Getting started with PyGos and Pylife

[andreas58]

I came back from vacation yesterday. I received a letter that a package has arrived from the UK. However, because I did not collect it within 7 days, it was returned to sender. The only thing I expect is the PyGo cradle, so it has been returned. How do I get a cradle now?

[exa]

@andreas58 Email pycom, it'll probably cost you a lot though because DHL is pricey and customs

[robert-hh]

@exa That depends on the value Pycom declares for the cradle. If it is less than 5,23€, or 0 if it is a delayed part of a previous delivery (like it can be seen here), then not taxes apply. Maybe Pycom manages meanwhile to ship from their dutch office to the EU.
Still the shipping costs apply.

[exa]

@robert-hh They charged me €10 for the cradle and €30 for shipping, I had to pay €25 for customs because they declared the value to be €40 so €65 in tota to charge a device that may never work

[robert-hh]

@exa That's exaggerate, especially since shipping was already include in the Kickstarter fee. I also do not know why PyCom do not use the Import One-Stop Shop of the EU for shipping into the EU. That would save costs and time for their customers.

[Stephen Glavin]

Has everyone who received an original batch ever received a cradle? I’ve sent multiple emails now to be told 1) that they’ve already been sent out (which I never received 2) subsequently ignored completely.

[Peter Bankuti]

@Stephen-Glavin
Negative, i think my bricks were delivered in the first week but never got any DHL notices since then. There were other people reporting even after pimping around with the cradle they could not get the devices working in any expected way. If that is true, the cradle does not make a difference. It also tells much there is no feedback in any form. Not even the lame excuses they always told us before the product launch. This can mean only 2 things:
A) there is no one at pycom who could come up with a working firmware and/or APP for this device
B) the device fails by design and they just do not care

[robert-hh]

@Peter-Bankuti I got a cradle with my second batch shipment and can confirm, that it does not get the device to any reasonable operation. The only thing I could do was updating the firmware. Then it could be detected by the PyLife app. And I can use it like a severely handicapped Wipy. Less fun than with a 3€ ESP32 device.
What I could see as well that PyGo firmware and PyLife app do not match.
Finally, I could use the cradle and REPL commands to bring a device into a deadlock state, where it just reboots over and over.
And yes, the device fails at least partially by design (e.g. wireless charging) and at the moment there is no feedback from Pycom about further plans with that device.

[Peter Bankuti]

Today i got my cradle. I am trying to be fair:

• it was easy to update the firmware on both my pygo1 and pygo2 device just as described in the documentation.
• After doing so reinstalled the Android app on my phone
• As i still did not remember my password i made the app send me a pw renewal link just as some weeks ago. The new password still populates both fields as you are typing, but this time the webform does update the password and a could finally login into my account
• Logging into my pylife portal via desktop is quite useless: i can only find my "groups" and that's it as nothing else has been implemented yet
• After the FW update i finally can connect my pygo to my phone using the app. This was not possible on the stock firmware.
• Inside the mobile app i can create groups, add persons to them, provision devices and add them to groups. Also the battery level of each pygo is reported back to the phone. But the goodness stops here. The map does not show the location of any of my devices, and it is also not possible to select the lora band. That returns an error. Have setup distance and alerts but can not attach those to any of the devices. And it is also not possible to wake up the devices by double tapping the display.

So all in all there is some advancement: now i have bluetooth connectable bricks.

[Bernard D'Havé]

@Peter-Bankuti Hi Peter,
I received also my cradle. But I don't know which PyGo is the one or two.
Do you know how to make the difference as the firmware is not the same for the 2 units?

Many thanks,
Bernard

[robert-hh]

@Bernard-D-Havé Just connect via Cradle to a terminal app. You will have a REPL prompt. There, push ctrl-b.

[Peter Bankuti]

@Bernard-D-Havé
Yes, if you are a tidy person, you can check the sticker on sheath in which they delivered the pygos :-D
If you mixed things up, then try to put your devices on the wireless charging pad. In most cases the pygo1 devices do not start charging, while pygo2 do. However i am not sure if that is true for all the devices.
I guess there should be some curl commands that would return relevant info about which FW is currently installed on the devices. That way one could find out, though pycom has not disclosed such a command yet.

Maybe someone else has an idea in this regard, but anyway i do not think you could do anything useful with the devices until pycom comes up with a firmware that does what we expect. I mean theoretically we could flash any firmware on the device with the cradle. Problem is: there is not even an LED we could blink. We do not know what parts make up the system so we can not begin to play around with those at least. And on the cradle i also do not find any broken out pins for external sensors (that was the idea at the beginning), so we even can not display humidity data if we have such a sensor lying around in our drawer.

As @robert-hh wrote even a 3€ ESP32 is more fun.

[Peter Bankuti]

@robert-hh Nice, it works! I did not know about that.

[Peter Bankuti]

@Brian-Wyld That reads like interesting, hard core folks can try do at least some exploration with the board. As for the tapping pattern i am beginning to consider trying different variations with a hammer ;-)

[Mr Admin]

@Peter-Bankuti
Given with the cradle we have the REPL, it should be possible to flash any ESP32 image if we have P8 and P2 to boot into the expressive firmware updater?
Without a schema its tricky... but we know which pins are on the back assuming the datasheet is correct.

• LTE module is probably on the other UART (pygo2)
• Lora as per LO1 modules I would suspect
• accelero (Bosch), battery charger ocntroller, GPS on I2C bus - an i2c scan might show them
• screen - SPI?
  The GPS and LTE might be held in reset using gpios (maybe via io expander) which would make it more tricky to detect them!

[Gritty moonshaw]

Here's our answer

[robert-hh]

@Gritty-moonshaw It started scanning relevant sites a while ago, because that's what I assumed. So: bye bye Pycom.

[robert-hh]

@Mr-Admin GPIO0 is not accessible. So you cannot put the device into the usual bootloader mode. There may be a way to start that by software.

[Peter Bankuti]

@Mr-Admin
A BOM in the datasheet could really help us, but guess what...there is no BOM :-D
The W01 is 43mm long, just like the casing of the pygos. So that can not fit in physically.

There is this command which makes me wonder now:
curl -v --request GET http://192.168.4.1/status -H "FW-Header-1: ota-verify"
Question is what does this verify. For sure this device would need a ton of reverse engineering by the community before we could do anything useful with them.

[robert-hh]

@Mr-Admin It should be possible to use OTA to load a generic firmware. A script has to be written to make use of OTA update, I have made two different ones in the past, when testing the OTA implementatton. One using a sd card access, one accessing a ftp server. That one should as well work with the PyGo devices. Code below as example.

#
# OTA update using ftplib and the pycom.ota_* methods
#
from ftplib import FTP
from pycom import ota_start, ota_write, ota_finish
import gc

class OTA:
    def __init__(self, verbose = True):
        self.size = 0
        self.verbose = verbose

    def ota(self, server_ip, user, password, filename, blocksize):
        try:
            ftp = FTP(server_ip, 21, user, password)
            ota_start()
            res = ftp.retrbinary("RETR " + filename, self._do_write, blocksize)
            ota_finish()
            if self.verbose:
                print("")
        except Exception as res:
            pass
        return res

    def _do_write(self, data):
        ota_write(data)
        if self.verbose:
            self.size += len(data)
            print("\r%7d " % self.size, end="")
        gc.collect()

def run():
        ota = OTA()
        res = ota.ota("10.0.0.171", "linaro", "linaro", "appimg.bin", 4096)
        print(res)

run()