Project cannot be installed without manual fixes – outdated dependencies and missing setup instructions

[SK9MM777]

Thank you for this excellent project – it is definitely the best option currently available for building a wall plotter.

However, for someone who is not a programmer, it was extremely difficult to identify the causes of the errors and find a working setup. There is no central installation guide, no clear information about the correct directories, and multiple technical obstacles that could only be bypassed through trial, error, and luck.

An update of the dependencies and a clear step-by-step setup guide would be extremely helpful.

Here is a complete list of the issues encountered during installation, documented step by step:

1. After cloning the repository and opening it with PlatformIO, the build failed immediately because several library versions defined in platformio.ini no longer exist or cannot be resolved by PlatformIO. Manual changes were required:

• WiFiManager: changed from @2.0.17+sha.b67b782 to @2.0.17
• ESPAsyncWebServer: changed from @3.7.4 to @3.7.7
• ESP32Servo: changed from @3.0.6+sha.e697ea7 to @3.0.7
• Adafruit_SSD1306: changed from @2.5.13+sha.78d6a13 to @2.5.14

2. After fixing those entries, the build failed again. Reason: the build process automatically calls npm run build, but there is no package.json in the root directory. This results in the following error:

npm ERR! enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, open ‘/…/mural/package.json’

3. Only after manually searching through the project was it discovered that the Node.js project is located in the tsc/ directory. This is not documented anywhere. Only by running cd tsc && npm install was it possible to proceed.

4.Running npm install in tsc/ produced numerous warnings and messages about deprecated packages. In addition, npm audit reported 9 moderate vulnerabilities. There is no package-lock.json. The project structure is non-obvious and the dependency tree is outdated.

5. After running npm run build, the TypeScript frontend was built successfully. However, the following message still appears during the build:

rm: data/www/worker/*: No such file or directory

Although the build succeeds, this error message is misleading and could easily be avoided. The script should check whether the directory exists before attempting to remove files.

Conclusion: Without manual fixes, digging through the project structure, and applying several technical adjustments, it is not possible to install the project. Updating the platformio.ini, modernizing the Node dependencies, and providing a clear installation guide (especially mentioning that the tsc/ directory must be used for the frontend build) would make a huge difference.