What software to use on M1 Mac? Atom & Pymakr not working

[ventureoverland]

Hi guys,
Its been a couple of years since I last played with my lopy's. Since then I have updated my computer (now running a M1 Mac). I installed Atom (both 1.6 and 1.55) and installed the Pymakr package. Both Atom versions fail with the same npm error when trying to install Pymakr.

The question: What software should I use to start using the Pycom products? The internet seems a wash with reports of the same problem but no solutions...

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks
Jon

[Kenneth sea]

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[Kenneth sea]

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[Miguel Moreno]

Hello @ventureoverland .

You are not alone ... One of the most annoying things I have experienced since I delved into the MicroPython/Python and JavaScript ecosystems is that you are always suffering from "dependency hell" issues here and then ...

Myself being more familiar with statically linked binary executable development tools, where the apps work for ever for a given base OS, did not expect that almost all MicroPython/Python/JavaScript development tools rely on external modules that keep evolving all the time and cause former good working apps to break unexpectedly.

That is the case with all Pycom editor plugins, be it for Atom or for Visual Studio Code.

As a result, I have resorted to the following actions in order to keep my development system working at all times, no matter what:

• On my M1 Mac ( MacBook Pro 13" ) I manually downloaded and installed the version "1.58.2, x86_64 bit" of "Visual Studio Code" (download link here).
• Then I installed the version "1.1.12" of the Pymakr plugin from Pycom (download link here)
• In Visual Studio Code preferences, I set the "Update: Mode" to "None" and the "Extensions: Auto Update" to "None", so that VSCode won't automatically update either itself or the extensions/plugins without my consent, which can potentially break the Pymakr plugin.

After performing these steps, I have not suffered any "sudden break" of my Pycom boards development environment.

I do not have the specific steps for Atom, but they should be similar to the ones I have listed for Visual Studio Code.

Hope this helps you, since the Pymark plugin does add nice functionality on top of what a raw serial communication tool can offer.

PS: There are a lot of new versions of Pymakr plugins released since the version that I reliably use ( 1.1.12 ), but to me it is a lot more important to have a stable, reliable and dependable development tools than to be chasing the "latest and greatest" features out of the plugins ... The "dependency hell" of the Python/JavaScript worlds seems to be something you have to take for granted ...

[ventureoverland]

@robert-hh said in What software to use on M1 Mac? Atom & Pymakr not working:

@ventureoverland Try to use simple terminal emulators first to solve the connection issue. As IDE, you can also try to use Thonny. As command line based tool, mpremote from the micropython.org mother ship is also very useful. https://github.com/micropython/micropython/tree/master/tools/mpremote
I do not know whether these connect at the Apple M1 device. Apple is always good in making simple things difficult (and maybe the opposite).

Thanks for the quick reply. Thonny works fine on the Mac (I use that for my Raspberry Pi Pico's etc). If I configure Thonny to connect to a standard ESP32 (via the Pycom Expansion Board), I can get the shell working on the Lopy4. So thats progress:)

Do I need to install the Pymaker package, or is the ESP32 interpreter all I need?

Thanks
Jon

[robert-hh]

@ventureoverland Try to use simple terminal emulators first to solve the connection issue. As IDE, you can also try to use Thonny. As command line based tool, mpremote from the micropython.org mother ship is also very useful. https://github.com/micropython/micropython/tree/master/tools/mpremote
I do not know whether these connect at the Apple M1 device. Apple is always good in making simple things difficult (and maybe the opposite).