Installation and set-up
Hardware requirements
Beside of a micropython board itself, a MicroUSB cable (USB A to USB micro B) is required.
Please be aware that not all MicroUSB cables on the market are suitable. Esp. cheap cables to "charge smartphones" might only carry out the power lines but not the data lines of the USB connection. Thus, those cables will nicely power the micropython board (e.g. from a battery pack) but there will be no data connection.
If there seems to be no data connection at all, try another cable! Most likely cables which came with smartphones or other devices which can be connected to computers will be ok.
Software requirements on the PC
There is no need to install any kind of specific IDE or development environment. Micropython is already installed on the pyboard. However, you might want to use a python friendly editor or development environment according to your needs.
Driver requirements
The pyboard provides different USB-based interfaces. By default it will be recognized as a serial connection and a mass-storage device.
Linux
By default most distributions should come with appropriate modules for the pyboard.
Use dmesg and lsusb to confirm that the pyboard got recognized correctly. A new serial device should be found under the dev folder (e.g. /dev/ttyACM0).
The mass-storage part might be automounted already (if an automounter is used). Otherwhise, one should be able to mount the pyboard in the same way like any USB memory device.
MAC OS
Windows
Windows will recognize the pyboard mass-storage unit by default. However, Windows requires an additional driver for the serial connection. The driver is available on the pyboard storage.
For Windows < 8 one can install the driver and since it is not signed by Microsoft, one has to approve a warning message and confirm the installation manually.
For Windows 8, this manual approval step is not longer available. It requires to reboot Windows into a special mode, which enables installation of unsigned drivers. More information can be found here
Driver install for Windows 8.1:
After "Driver Signature Enforcement" has been disabled open Device Manager:
Make sure your pyboard is connected, it should be displayed under "Other Devices". (Driver is installed on the caption so it is placed where it will end up once the driver is installed).
Right click your pyboard and select update driver:
Choose "Browse my computer..."
Choose "Let me pick from a list..."
- On the next selection chose "all devices"
- Click have disk, browse for pybcdc.inf
- Install
After installation, one might want to install a program for serial connection like putty or hyperterminal.
Notepad++ is a nice text editor for Python amongst others. You can get it here.