ARDUINO BRINGS A MICROPYTHON

IDE
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 by:

Arya Voronova
November 14, 2022


Both Arduino and MicroPython are giants when it comes to the electronics
education area, and each one of them represents something you can’t pass up on
as an educator. Arduino offers you a broad ecosystem of cheap hardware with a
beginner-friendly IDE, helped by forum posts explaining every single problem
that you could and will stumble upon. MicroPython, on the other hand, offers a
powerful programming environment ripe for experimentation, and doesn’t
unleash a machine gun fire of triangle brackets if you try to parse JSON slightly
incorrectly. They look like a match made in heaven, and today, from
heaven descends the Arduino Lab for MicroPython.
This is not an Arduino IDE extension – it’s a separate Arduino IDE-shaped app
that does MicroPython editing and uploads code to your board from a friendly
environment. It works over a serial port, and as such, the venerable ESP8266-
based boards shouldn’t be be left out – it even offers file manager capabilities!
Arduino states that this is an experimental effort – it doesn’t yet have syntax
checks, for instance, and no promises are made. That said, it already is a
wonderful MicroPython IDE for beginner purposes, and absolutely a move in the
right direction. Want to try? Download it here, there’s even a Linux build!
High-level languages let you build projects faster – perfect fit for someone
getting into microcontrollers. Hopefully, what follows is a MicroPython library
manager and repository! We’ve first tried out MicroPython in 2016, and
it’s come a long way since then – we’ve seen quite a few beginner-friendly
MicroPython intros, from a gaming handheld programming course, to a bipedal
robot programming MicroPython exploration. And, of course, you can bring your
C libraries with you.
Posted in Microcontrollers, Software HacksTagged arduino, Arduino IDE, micropython