MicroPython development on the Raspberry Pi Pico

By -

Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico suggests that you use the Thonny editor for development.

Thonny will get you off to a quick start, but you may have an alternative editor you'd prefer to use.

Lots of my friends now use VS Code; some are vim or emacs experts; many, like me, use PyCharm as their normal Python development environment.

I find it more comfortable to use my normal editor for MicroPython development, but I have more compelling reasons.

The first is refactoring support. I'm learning as I go, and I often want to improve the design of my code libraries as I come to understand things better. PyCharm does a very good job of refactoring Python code.

There's another issue to do with version control.

I'm currently sharing my Pico code on GitHub. That means I need to keep code on the Pico in sync with the code on my workstation. I haven't found an easy way to do that with Thonny, so I am using another tool to move and test code.

rshell was my first choice, but I've had some problems with it, as have others.  Les Pounder (@biglesp) came to my rescue. He has a really useful series of blog posts called Tooling Tuesday.

A while ago Les recommended Adafruit's ampy for use with MicroPython boards. Ampy works really well with the Pico. I now have it on my workstation, and on a Raspberry Pi which I also use for Pico development.

Les also recommends tio for serial communications. tio is a serial terminal program. Its great advantage over others is that it will try to reconnect automatically if the serial link goes down. tio is available on the Pi but I couldn't find it in the official repositories for my very backdated Linux Mint installation. Fortunately it took just three minutes to download tio and build it from source, following the instructions on its GitHub page.

I'll soon be publishing more Pico and Tiny2040 code. If you want to stay up to date, follow me (@rareblog) on twitter.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Controlling a Raspberry Pi Pico remotely using PySerial

By -
Image
Update : I'm using thie code below in another project, and found that I had not correctly fixed the reported bug. The new version passes automated tests, and I am pretty sure it works OK. I have changed the name of the class to Talker  since it can both send and receive information. Apologies to all concerned for the bug! Introduction You can use a Raspberry Pi Pico as a powerful peripheral to a host - a Raspberry Pi, a Jetson Nano, a laptop or workstation. In this article you'll see how to interact with a Pico running MicroPython or CircuitPython by writing some Python code that runs on the host. The software is easy to use. It enables you to send a Python statement to the Pico and read the results. The statement can be any valid MicroPython code. Setting up the host and the Pico For this article I've used a Raspberry Pi as the host, but any computer running Windows, Linux or Mac OS will do so long as it has Python 3.5 or later installed. In particular, you can use this t...
Read more

Five steps to connect Jetson Nano and Arduino

By -
Image
Yesterday's post showed how to link a micro:bit to the Jetson Nano. One of the members of the (unofficial) NVIDIA Jetson Nano group on Facebook asked about connecting an Arduino to the Jetson. Here's a simple recipe for getting data from the Arduino to the Jetson Nano. It should work on all the Jetson models, not just the Nano, but I only have Nanos to hand. On request, I've added a recipe at the end of this post which sends data from the Jetson Nano to the Arduino; it turns the default LED on the Arduino on or off. The recipe for sending data from the Arduino to the Jetson has just 5 stages: Program the Arduino. (I used the ASCIITable example). Connect the Arduino to the Jetson using a USB connector Install pyserial on the Jetson Download a three-line Python script Run the script.   Programming the Arduino I used an Arduino Uno, and checked it on a verteran Duemilanove (above), but any Arduino should work. You'll need to do this step usi...
Read more

Raspberry Pi Pico project 2 - MCP3008

By -
Image
This post show you how to drive the MCP3008 8-channel ADC using a Raspberry Pi Pico. I'll start with a personally embarrassing and annoyingly relevant story. I'll also tell you about a minor 'gotcha' when using SPI on the Pico, and how you can avoid it. Finally, I've include the code and fritzing diagram I used to test the interface. First, the story. Back in 2012, when the Raspberry Pi was fresh and new, I was running a startup called Quick2Wire.  We made add-on boards for the Pi. Just before Christmas we sent out our first batch of boards to a small army of beta-testers. The beta boards didn't work. Somehow a single trace on the pcb had got deleted and one of the GPIO pins was isolated. The boards were still usable and it wasn't too hard to solder in a jumper wire to replace the missing trace, but it was very embarrassing. It wasn't just that we'd shipped boards with a defect. The really annoying thing was that I'd set up an  automated loop-bac...
Read more