First steps with LoPy & PySense and feedback
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Hi all,
I just ordered a LoPy & PySense last week, and started playing with it (amazing little thing), and have quite a bit of feedback I would like to share.
- When you receive the LoPy, there's a nice sticker about upgrading it. Great, but it's really not that simple!
- Short P23 and GND while at the same time plugging the thing in, with only a PySense. OK, that's fun, especially when you're more of a software than hardware guy and don't have all the tools you didn't think you needed, but it would be oh so much simpler for everyone if there was a jumper on the PySense (and the expansion board) for that. I guess the same for the safe boot combination probably wouldn't hurt either.
- Beyond that, it would clearly help if it was possible to upgrade firmware in the field without touching the hardware.
- Most attempts at using the Pycom firmware updater on my Mac were met with failure. I trawled the forums and found quite a few things, not quite sure what actually helped or not, but here are some bits
- It kept hanging on the "reading information from the board" screen. No visual feedback, no timeout, nothing.
- I think this bit https://forum.pycom.io/topic/88/how-to-solve-the-firmware-update-failures was necessary. Not sure.
- I also think unchecking "High speed transfer" was necessary, not sure either.
- With these two, it did go a bit further, but it always failed on the largest transfer (which is actually not visible in the log window shown in the updater. It says "failed", and then shows the details of two successful transfers... Talk about confusing!
- In the end, I had to guess the URL to download the latest firmware (can't you just add links on the downloads page?), use esptool.py manually, and, most importantly, reduce the speed to 57600 bps (otherwise it always ends up with the dreaded C100 error after about 30%).
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The getting started guide tells you about inserting the LoPy in the expansion board. The expansion board is on back-order so I only got the PySense (which fits most of my needs anyway), but it's quite a challenge to find which way you're supposed to insert the LoPy into it (yes, it's on the PDF of the PySense pinout, but it's not visible from the preview of that PDF that it contains that information). Showing how to insert the LoPy in the 3 boards (or even just being explicit about the fact that the LED-next-to-USB rule is valid in all cases) would help, and it definitely wouldn't hurt if both the LoPy (and WiPy, SiPy...) and the expansion board/PySense/PyTrack had a pin 1 marking or something equivalent!
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There are two antenna ports on the LoPy. A little bit of a marking to indicate which is which wouldn't hurt.
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The cases (probably) fit the expansion board, but not the PySense. Wouldn't hurt being a bit more explicit about it on the site. Are there any cases that would fit the PySense?
Keep on the good work!
Jacques.
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@jcaron said in First steps with LoPy & PySense and feedback:
The cases (probably) fit the expansion board, but not the PySense. Wouldn't hurt being a bit more explicit about it on the site. Are there any cases that would fit the PySense?
+1 for the cases issue. I bought a PySense and a PyTrack and a case for each. Pretty frustrating that there aren't the appropriate mounting points in the case for those boards.
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