I’ve been playing with a few MicroPython projects recently on several different embedded platforms, including a couple of ESP32 WiFi modules. There are various ways to program these modules:

• Use a serial terminal and ampy (maintained by [devxpy] since being dropped by Adafruit in 2018).
• If you use Pycom boards or WiFy firmware, there are the pymakr plugins for Atom and Visual Studio.
• If you prefer the command-line like me, there is rshell by one of the top MicroPython contributors [Dave Hylands].

For over a year, I have been quite happy with rshell until I started working on these wireless nodes. Being lazy, I want to tinker with my ESP32 modules from the sofa, not drag my laptop into the kitchen or balcony to plug up a USB cable. Can’t I work with them wirelessly?

Well, you can use WebREPL. While its functional, it just didn’t strike my fancy for some reason. [Elliot] mentioned in a recent podcast that he’s using telnet to access his wireless nodes, but he’s using esp-link on an ESP8266, which means throwing another chip into the mix.

The Thonny IDE

I had all but given up when by chance I saw this video on the Dronebot Workshop channel about running MicroPython on the new Raspberry Pi Pico boards. Bill was using Thonny, a Python IDE that is popular in the education community. Thonny was introduced in 2015 by Aivar Annamaa of the University of Tartu in Estonia. Thonny was designed to address common issues observed during six years of teaching Python programming classes to beginners. If you read about the project and its development, you’ll see that he’s put a lot of effort into making Thonny, and it shows.

Leaning about Thonny got me curious, and after a little digging I discovered that it has WebREPL support for MicroPython right out-of-the-box. Although this is a new feature and classified as experimental, I found it reasonably stable to use and more than adequate for home lab use. Continue reading “Wireless MicroPython Programming With Thonny” →