MicroPython Forum (Archive)

Hi I'm definitely a newbie at this game and I'm getting quiet frustrated with all my attempts at getting up and running with either a Pie Zero and/or a Pyboard. My issues all revolve around drivers for the said hardware on a Windows 8.1 platform. I've spent countless hours searching for solutions relating to drivers/enumeration/compatibility with the Microsoft windows circus! I have a spare PC that I could dedicate to my development efforts so my question is: What is the most popular and easy OS platform to support the Pyboard. At this time I'm considering Ubuntu linux. Does anyone out there have any others suggestions cause Bill Gates and company have tried my patience once too many times.

Thanks Denis

Generally Linux works well, and Ubuntu is a good maintained distribution, where you should have an easy access.

windows should work. I'm using pyboard in windows 10 works OK. the driver I got is from DfuSe_Demo_V3.0.5_Setup.exe you can download from STmicro website after install Dfu, usb driver included.

http://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/ ... 155676.pdf

Linux (IMO). There is a bit of a learning curve but it's well worth taking the trouble, in my view.

Choose a distro to suit your own preferences as the techniques for development will be identical. My current preference is Mint with Xfce. Ubuntu will be fine if you like the Unity interface, but more Windows-like display managers are available - Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce. Opinions differ on Unity - it's debatable if it's worth learning as Canonical plan to can it.

I'd also offer a plug for Dave Hylands' rshell https://github.com/dhylands/rshell which is a great way of communicating with boards.

Due to continued driver issues with Mac OSX Catalina, I have decided to go the Linux route as many forum members seem to prefer it to other OS. I'm getting an old chromebook, which I'll use to put Linux on and then exclusively use for micropython dev.

What do you guys think is the best Linux distro to work with ESP32/8266? Is Ubuntu 20.04 too 'new' ? Which distro works well with either uPyCraft or Thonny?

Any insights/recommendations are welcome.

Hmm. I'm currently using Mac OS Catalina and not having any issues.

If I had to pick, I would still pick linux over Mac for doing development with MicroPython.

Linux here too. It is certainly useful being able to just run "dmesg" or "lsusb" to figure out why things aren't working.

That said, there are lots of people doing MicroPython work on Windows. Here's a useful guide to driver issues: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToFix ... ndows.aspx

Primesty wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 08, 2020 10:07 pm

...Is Ubuntu 20.04 too 'new' ? Which distro works well with either uPyCraft or Thonny?...

An advantage of an up to date distro is that you get a later version of Python (3.8.2 in Ubuntu 20.04). I use Ubuntu, Mint and Debian and all work well with rshell. Mint is v20 which is recent. I haven't used the two IDE's you mentioned.

Raspberry Pi OS on Raspberry Pi, based on Debian 10, on Raspberry Pi 4B (2/4/8 GB of RAM) is a true PC desktop replacement. From August we can boot/install on USB media (pendrive, HD, SSD), and a 64 bits version is in beta.

The full image, "Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) with desktop and recommended software" has many softwares pre-installed useful for Physical Computing (with sensors, etc), like Mu Editor, Node-RED, Scratch, Thonny, Wolfram Mathematica (free, while it is paid on other plataforms like Windows, Mac OS and Linux), etc.

Debian 10 (Buster) and Raspberry Pi OS has more MicroPython utilities in its repositories than previous versions. My typical configuration on Raspberry Pi : Mu Editor also (pre)installs :
python3-uflash v1.2.4+dfsg : module and utility for flashing the BBC micro:bit
firmware-microbit-micropython v1.0.1-1 : MicroPython runtime for the BBC micro:bit

Manjaro/Arch is another Linux distribution very practical to use for Python, MicroPython and microcontroller programming. Manjaro is a rolling release distribution, with packages a lot more up to date then other Linux ditributions. Manjaro has AUR packages from the community complementing the large list of packages from official repository :
- ninja-ide and spyder3;
- mu-editor, Thonny, Sublime Text 3, Atom, PyCharm, Visual Studio Code, via AUR;
- Fritzing and KiCAD;
- LTSpice XVII via AUR (runs on Wine, needs Wine and Wine-Mono installed from official repositories);
- dfu-util, screen, esptool, arm-none-eabi-gcc;
- teensyduino via AUR : Arduino IDE + Teensyduino + teensy_loader_cli;
- tytools, micropython, micropython-lib, mpy-cross, pycom-firmware-updater, gcc-xtensa-esp32-elf-bin, OpenMV-IDE-bin, via AUR.