New Pymakr Atom Release v1.4.0 - No more FTP?

[Ralph]

Pymakr has just been updated to v1.4.0. There are few new features that we wanted to highlight here, since they might help a lot of users develop just a little bit quicker.

Binary file uploads
One major update is the ability to upload any kind of file, not just python and other UTF-8 encoded files. If you're running a webserver that include images on your board, or want to upload .mpy files for example, it's no longer needed to fall back to FTP. Any images, font files, mpy files, or any other file can now be uploaded without issues.
The default settings still exclude it, so behaviour stays the same for users that don't need it. Make sure you check 'Upload all file types', or adding the file types you are using to the 'Upload file types' list if you want to use this new feature.

Upload stability improvements
Uploading got a bit more reliable. A hash-check is done after each upload to ensure the upload was correct. If it doesn't pass the check, or another error occurred during upload, Pymakr will retry to upload that file a few times. Besides that, if your upload is interrupted half way for fails for some reason, Pymakr will now remember the status and start the next upload from where it stopped last time.

Auto-connect to USB
A very simple but useful feature for people that swap boards a lot. When enabled, Pymakr detects any boards connected and will automatically connect to it. No need to list the serial ports and paste it into the settings manually. If you switch boards, it'll detect the swap and connect to the new board right away (well, within 2 seconds). When the feature is enabled, any address setting in either the project settings or global settings is ignored completely.

All in all we hope that these changes will minimise the number of times users will have to fall back to FTP. Uploading big files through Pymakr is still slower than FTP, but are no problem to upload. Often waiting a little bit extra is more convenient than switching to a different program, especially since bigger files are usually the files that don't change very often.

Let us know what you think of the new features and what you would like to see in the next release. If you have any issues, tell us either in this topic or create an issue on github and we'll fix it as soon as we can.

P.S. These same updates will be released to the VSCode plugin very soon.