I need a Pycom for Dummies book. For an aboloute beginner, all of the postings here and the tutorials by Pycom are frustratihg and worthless.
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I need a Pycom for Dummies book. For an aboloute beginner, all of the postings here and the tutorials by Pycom are frustratihg and worthless.
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Thanks for that feedback, I will definitely take it all into consideration. At the moment our priority is making the getting started part of the documentation more complete, as well as producing actual datasheets for our products. Once this work is completed I will move on to strengthening our examples and library documentation. I agree with you its not clear what does what and how to use it if you arn't able to pick up the code and read through it all (you shouldn't have to). Once these have been improved the next step will be writing guides on best practices not just about memory usage but also power usage and security.
Once again thanks for the feedback, it has definitely been taken on-board and noted.
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I would like to see that you have an abstract for each of your libraries which features of the hardware are supported and which not. If you have planed to support the feature an expected date for delivery will be nice. Not an exact date. Q? 18 will be OK.
And more important for our convenience. A link to the manuals of the chips, so we can implement the missing features by our own, if we need them before the expected date ;)
I think most beginners are not able to extract the features of your library by having a quick look on the source. And more important they do not have a fealing for the missing parts. They are reading for e.q. GPS and expect that they will get every feature they know from a GPS software and not that you show them only how to do the basic communication between the hardware components. They expect not that they have to search for the specifications and implement the needed parts.
A guide about the memory management and good tips about programming with a low RAM footage will be nice. I don't like the one of micropython. It seems to list all needed parts, but as a tutorial it is really bad. And you never know which tips for standard micropython are useful for your implementation. And I don't think that the new 4MB modules will be a work around for the memory problem. You have more memory, but access will be slower (I dont have such a device, so correct me, if I am wrong). So knowing details how to keep the memory footage low, will be still an important knowledge.
I appreciate a beginners guide for your hardware. A best practice how to expand the limited amount of free pins of the pytrack module will be fine for me. I appreciate as well a list of sensors and actors which have a library running on your system, so we can simply plug and play. Software is easy but time consuming. Changing the dam physic, so that my hardware will run; that is the hard part :-o
As long as you cannot write all this by your own over night, it will be nice to have a list of links with a short description of the important parts we have to read.
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@charliem
Thanks for your feedback. Third party libraries are a tricky subject. We encourage them but sadly don't have the bandwidth to support them all. Its usually best to ask the creators of a library for support. If that fails you can try ask the rest of the Pycom community here on the forum if they have any experience with the library. We provide some of our own libraries (available here: https://github.com/pycom/pycom-libraries) which we obviously will provide support for.
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@seb Information would be useful about how it fits into the micropython ecosystem, where to get reliable libraries, etc.
When I was starting with the WyPi, I was reading and posting in inappropriate forums, until someone told me to come here. I was also frustrated by library support (e.g. requests.py); it seems like these are not available from Pycom; and you have to go elsewhere? And sometimes those are not very mature or active, so when problems arise it's hard to find the right community to help sort them out.
At least that was my experience. I was very frustrated trying to get an application to run reliably, and the minimal documentation was a roadblock. But perhaps my app was a tad bit heavy weight for the WyPi (multiple threads, socket access, and http activities). I gave up and switched to the RPi Zero W.
Thanks for working on the docs. This will have a huge payback for Pycom adoption.
Charlie
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This is something I have been actively working on fixing, very soon the whole getting started part of our docs will be updated with a much more visual step by step guide explaining everything. I hope you can bear with us for a short while until this is released.
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@seb Even the beginning tutorials assume you know how to connect to the Wipy board and get the interface running. More detailed steps are needed.
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Hi,
I am sorry to hear about your frustrations. We are currently overhauling the getting started section of our documentation to be more comprehensive and this should hopefully be available soon. After this we plan on re-viewing all of our examples and improve on them. Is there anything in specific you are having difficulties with? This feedback will be very valuable as we make these improvements and will guide us on which parts of the documentation need the most attention.
