PS1 2018 Welcome to CircuitPython Workshop

Content for Hackerspace Pumping Station: One workshop, 17 December 2018.

The following instructions walk through setup needed to complete this workshop.

Setup

For this workshop, participants will want to install Mu editor.

To install Mu editor on Mac or Windows:

Windows users may install Mu from here.

Mac users may install Mu from here.

To install Mu editor on Linux x86:

Linux users must be running Python 3.6 or newer. Install by running sudo apt install python3. Then, install pip3 by running sudo apt install python3-pip.

Next, create a virtual environment: python3 -m venv .muenv. Follow the instructions to install venv if it is not already installed. To activate the virtual environment, run source .muenv/bin/activate. Once inside the virtual environment (.muenv), install Mu by running pip3 install mu-editor.

Linux users must add their user to the dialout group to access the serial console output. From the command line, run sudo adduser $USER dialout to add your user to the dialout group. Then, log out of the user and log back in for the change to take affect.

If the serial console is not working, first verify that your user was successfully added to dialout. From the command line run nano /etc/group. Find the line beginning with dialout: and verify your user is at end of the line, after a comma with no space, i.e. dialout:foo,your_user.

Running Mu editor

To run Mu on Windows, double-click the icon.

To run Mu on Mac, double-click the icon in the Applications folder.

To run Mu on Linux, from inside the virtual environment, type python3 -m mu or mu-editor into the command line.

Inside Mu editor

Once Mu is opened, it will present a list of options. For this workshop, choose "Adafruit CircuitPython".

If there is no CircuitPython compatible board plugged in when the editor is opened, there will be a dialog box that starts with "Could not find an attached Adafruit CircuitPython device". This is normal.

Content for Workshop

This repo contains all the content used in the workshop. To access it during the workshop, you may view it on the web as you follow along. You may wish to have the files available locally. To do this, install git and clone the repo to your machine using git clone https://github.com/kattni/PS1_2018.git to create a directory containing the contents of the repo.