Installing Adafruit-Blinka breaks RPi.GPIO

[eluum]

Board Name

Raspberry Pi Zero 2W

Steps

Installing adafruit-blinka in a python 3.11 venv installs Jetson.GPIO as a dependency. Importing RPi.GPIO then causes the error 'Could not determine Jetson model'. Uninstalling Jetson.GPIO manually with pip resolves the issue.

Description

No response

Additional information

No response

[crigel]

I am seeing the same. Several hours down the drain. Here is a summary of the steps that I have taken.

Summary of Troubleshooting Steps
Our goal was to get a simple Blinka script working on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (64-bit OS) and resolve the initial Exception: Could not determine Jetson model error.

1. Standard Reinstallation

Theory: A simple installation error had occurred, and the wrong GPIO library (Jetson.GPIO) was installed by mistake.
Action: Uninstall Jetson.GPIO and reinstall adafruit-blinka.
Result: Failed. The installation process for adafruit-blinka automatically pulled in Jetson.GPIO again, proving the problem was a faulty dependency.
2. Aggressive Cleanup and Reinstallation

Theory: There might be multiple conflicting packages or a specific conflicting library (like one for the Raspberry Pi 5) causing the issue.
Action: Uninstall a wide range of Adafruit and GPIO-related packages, including a Pi 5-specific library we found, then reinstall adafruit-blinka.
Result: Failed. Even from a cleaner state, pip's automatic dependency resolver still chose to install Jetson.GPIO. This confirmed the dependency definition within the Blinka package itself was flawed for your platform.
3. Manual Installation (The --no-deps Strategy)

Theory: Since pip's automatic dependency resolution was broken, we had to take manual control. We would install only the parts we knew were correct and then install Blinka without its dependencies.
Action:
Install a "safe" list of low-level libraries (RPi.GPIO, lgpio, etc.).
Install adafruit-blinka using the pip install --no-deps flag.
Result: Partial Success. This was a major breakthrough. The Jetson.GPIO error was finally gone! However, it was replaced by a new error, ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'microcontroller', which occurred when your script tried to initialize I2C (busio).
4. Expanding the Manual Dependency List

Theory: The new ModuleNotFoundError meant our manual dependency list was incomplete. Blinka needed more of its helper libraries to provide features like busio (I2C/SPI).
Action: We tried several variations of this:
Adding adafruit-circuitpython-busdevice to the "safe" list (This failed because busdevice itself triggered the original Jetson.GPIO bug).
Installing a large list of all required Adafruit libraries at once with --no-deps.
Adding low-level communication libraries like pyftdi and pyserial.
Result: All variations failed. We successfully kept Jetson.GPIO away, but the ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'microcontroller' persisted, proving the problem wasn't just a missing library but a fundamental failure in how the Blinka library was initializing itself when installed this way.
5. Abandoning the piwheels Repository

Theory: The pre-compiled packages ("wheels") for Raspberry Pi, hosted on piwheels.org, were the source of the broken dependency information. We had to force pip to download the original source code from the main Python repository, pypi.org.
Action: Use the --index-url flag to point pip only to PyPI.
Result: Failed. The log showed that pip was still looking at piwheels.org. This proved that a system-level configuration on your Raspberry Pi was forcing the use of piwheels.
6. Disabling the System-Wide pip Configuration

Theory: This was the final layer. We had to temporarily disable the system file (/etc/pip.conf or a user-level file) that was forcing pip to use the broken piwheels repository.
Action: Rename any and all pip.conf files to disable them, then run a simple pip install adafruit-blinka.
Result: Final Failure. The log showed that even with the configuration files not present, pip still used cached versions of the broken packages and failed to install correctly.

[eluum]

I am seeing the same. Several hours down the drain. Here is a summary of the steps that I have taken.

Summary of Troubleshooting Steps Our goal was to get a simple Blinka script working on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (64-bit OS) and resolve the initial Exception: Could not determine Jetson model error.

1. Standard Reinstallation

Theory: A simple installation error had occurred, and the wrong GPIO library (Jetson.GPIO) was installed by mistake. Action: Uninstall Jetson.GPIO and reinstall adafruit-blinka. Result: Failed. The installation process for adafruit-blinka automatically pulled in Jetson.GPIO again, proving the problem was a faulty dependency. 2. Aggressive Cleanup and Reinstallation

In my case, installing Adafruit-Blinka then uninstalling Jetson.GPIO allowed GPIO to be used. (Step 1 above WITHOUT reinstalling blinka afterwards). I'm not sure if this is a full fix though as I haven't thoroughly tested blinka functionality afterwards.

It looks like the Jetson.GPIO dependency was introduced in release 8.60.0 so installing version 8.59.0 is probably the best fix for now. You also have to clear pip's cache or it will use the cached newer version from the previous install, even though it does not match the requested version.

[makermelissa]

A lot of this stems from updating the project from setup.py to use pyproject.toml, which appears that it may be too rigid for a package that supports multiple processors. I'm still researching options (such as optional dependencies) to make it work closer to it did before.

[johnW-ret]

This is absolutely a regression. I was able to run the install script a few weeks ago with no issue and now it's installing Jetson.GPIO and yielding errors related to Jetson.

Thanks Firesphere this works

pip3 install adafruit-blinka==8.50

[makermelissa]

This should now be fixed by #981.