Pymakr... Time of Death : 09/02... ;-)

[bucknall]

Hi Everyone!

Quick introduction - My name is Alex and I've recently joined Pycom as a Developer Evangelist. I'll be working to support the community through events (Hackathons & Workshops), with documentation/tutorials and any other support that you, the community, need! I'll be starting to set up weekly webinars to chat with you about troubleshooting, feature requests, MicroPython, IoT and anything else you want to talk about! I'll post again with more details once a schedule has been drawn up! In the meantime, feel free to contact me here on the forums, by email at alex@pycom.io and on twitter as @AlexRBucknall. I'm always happy to help out!

On to why you're really here... ;-)! So we've been discussing the state of Pymakr and where it fits into our road map. We've come to the conclusion that it would be better for us to support the community by allowing you to use editors and IDE's of your own preference rather than asking you to use our own tool. So as of today, we are retiring Pymakr as an IDE...

...Instead, we'll be bringing Pymakr back as plugins for your favourite IDEs & editors! From this point forwards, the Dev team is starting work on plugins for the 4 most popular IDEs & editors at the moment. We'll be starting with plugins for Atom and Visual Studio Code, followed by Sublime and PyCharm. These plugins will bring across the functionality that Pymakr had (e.g. Sync, etc.) and still allow you to work in environments that you're comfortable/familiar with!

We hope that this is the right decision and look forward to hearing your feedback!

All the best,
The Pycom Team

[danielm]

Good decision in my opinion, looking forward for Sublime plugin :)

[iotmaker]

looking forward fo the atom one...

[arthurlutz]

I'm not entirely sure this is such good news. As a developer it was rather unlikely that I would end up using pymakr, but I did see some advantages in terms of "quickstarting" non-developer type profiles with their pycom devices. See parts of discussion about firmware upgrade via pymakr here https://forum.pycom.io/topic/627/pymkr-to-upgrade-firmware

On the bright side, I would hope that http://platformio.org/ is on the road map, I guess it would fit in with atom since plateform.io are just a bunch of plugins for atom. With multiple target devices would be the killer feature for me (edit project, save/compile to multiple devices at once).

[Pete]

Sounds good to me - to be honest I'm quite happy coding in Atom and deploying via FTP even without any plugins, but I'll give them a go when they arrive.

If complete programming beginners (a la Arduino) are in your target market then it might perhaps make sense to also provide a ready-made complete configuration (one of the above IDEs with the appropriate plugins already installed) to reduce the barrier to entry and give a standard environment to write basic tutorials against.

As I said elsewhere though - at this point I think the most urgent task has to be completeness and reliability of the modules and APIs that run on the boards themselves. We can code and deploy already using off-the-shelf tools, and the current firmware updater is adequate, but for what's on board we're totally reliant on what you guys produce. If you have developers who can do either, that's where (IMHO) you should be pointing them for now.

Pete

[Shaun]

I use UltraEdit.

I would like a tool to replace Putty and FileZilla and support firmware updating.

[duffo64]

@bucknall said in Pymakr... Time of Death : 09/02... ;-):

We've come to the conclusion that it would be better for us to support the community by allowing you to use editors and IDE's of your own preference rather than asking you to use our own tool.

Great news ! To me, this is the way to go !

[tholden]

@Shaun : Use mpfshell fork that supports Lopy

[Pete]

@tholden Thanks a lot for the pointer to mpfshell - that looks perfect! All I need now for a workflow is stock Atom and mpfshell, which I can script. Really no need for any custom plugins for me.

Pete

[jomifo]

@bucknall Just my 2 cents- I think most developers can get by fairly well without official IDE plugins. At this stage, I would prefer as many dev resources as possible on maturing the firmware. Although, I realize this may not be possible because of operational structure and developer skills.

[Pete]

At this stage, I would prefer as many dev resources as possible on maturing the firmware.

Yes, exactly.

This is the essential work, custom tools are a nice-to-have.

The good basic design of the system (using standard interfaces, ie telnet, FTP, serial) means that special tools are not required. The Pycom team should be reaping the benefit of that by deferring tooling work for now, in favour of the core.

Pete

[Jiemde]

@danielm Same for me, waiting forward for Sublime plugin.

[bucknall]

@jomifo @Pete One of our promises is to ensure that the tech is accessible to anyone starting to use it, so we do intend to dedicate time towards building these plugins. This, however will not detract from any engineering effort on maturing the firmware! We aren't reallocating resources to put work on these plugins in front of developing the device firmware, it's simply moving the effort from Pymakr over to these new plugins. We're still very much pushing as fast as we can with the firmware updates and I intend to try to make the development process more visible to everyone across the next couple of weeks.

In regards to beginner tools, it may end up that there is a solution similar to platformio, which would effectively be the atom editor with Pymakr plugin pre-installed for beginners.

[jomifo]

Thanks @bucknall for the further information. FWIW, I'm a heavy vim (with a plethora of plugins) and terminal user, so I'll put my hat in the ring for a vim plugin.

Also, an unrelated topic- I believe I've seen numerous posts in regards to new builds breaking people's code and maybe even breaking published examples. I would suggest some simple code-driven tests and a automated testing framework of some sort.

[bucknall]

@jomifo Thanks for letting me know - would you mind dropping me a DM or email pointing to what is breaking with the new builds? I'll see if we can pinpoint the problem.

Point noted about Vim, I'd definitely be interested in that too haha! I think unfortunately that will fall behind the four tools I highlight as we need to prioritise but I would also love to maybe one day see a Vim plugin!

[jasonriedy]

As an Emacs user, file transfer and console access are fine. I'd rather have deep sleep on the LoPy...

[Pete]

@bucknall said in Pymakr... Time of Death : 09/02... ;-):

We aren't reallocating resources to put work on these plugins in front of developing the device firmware, it's simply moving the effort from Pymakr over to these new plugins.

If the Pymakr developers don't have the right skill-set for the firmware, or if the nature of the firmware work or its development process means they'd just be tripping over each other with the existing folks, then fine. Otherwise, let's have 'em on @jasonriedy's DeepSleep, or whatever causes me to be kicked out the REPL when I try to inspect the WLAN config :-)

Pete

[MaSePreetz]

@bucknall
Hi Alex,

in my opinion dropping PyMakr makes sense.

But i would like to point out that the possibility to get the REPL on the console inside the IDE
is very important.

I am new to Python and am struggling with the syntax (doing Java and JavaScript for my living). The REPL
gives me the opportunity to test my code while developing with direct feedback and print() debugging.
This is really beneficial.

In addition i witnessed that within our company we setup a LoPy within minutes for a simple demo
by using PyMakr, your demo projects and feedback on the REPL loop.
So this REPL integration is crucial (at least for starters, not so much for experts).

The same applies for a simple file transfer/sync mechanism.

I know that it is possible to achieve all this with several other tools in combination, but this is
rather old-fashioned. (i worked with and appreciated emacs, telnet, the command line, but in
my spare time i love integrated IDEs as a one-stop shop!)

I am eager to see your plugins,
Marc

[Pete]

@MaSePreetz said in Pymakr... Time of Death : 09/02... ;-):

But i would like to point out that the possibility to get the REPL on the console inside the IDE
is very important.

I am new to Python and am struggling with the syntax (doing Java and JavaScript for my living). The REPL
gives me the opportunity to test my code while developing with direct feedback and print() debugging.
This is really beneficial.

Having the REPL is great, and impressive on such a constrained device. But does it really make a difference to your dev workflow whether it's in the same window as your editor or in a terminal next to it?

Or, if it must be in the same window, Atom at least has a few plugins that can do that:
https://atom.io/packages/terminal-plus
https://atom.io/packages/atom-terminal-panel
and probably others.

Pete

[mo-seph]

I'm looking at the LoPy for educational use, and having everything all together in Pymakr was quite useful - it becomes much harder if we have to support student's individual IDEs and strange setups. It's probably manageable though, if we come up with a single, cross platform supported solution.

The thing that is really tricky, though, is the FTP uploads, as they need to be done over the LoPy's wifi, and in a room with 20 LoPys that becomes really challenging. Is anything planned for doing file uploads over the USB serial?