pybkick

Push software to a pyboard quickly, without using USB Mass Storage mode.

Rationale

Pyboards are small microcomputers which can execute code written in Micropython, which is a Python3 compatible language which includes a small subset of the Python3 standard library.

The suggest way to deploy code to a PyBoard is to mount it as a USB Mass Storage device, and then edit files directly on the device, or simply copy over the relevant files from a PC. This approach can be problematic because if the device is reset, it can cause the Mass Storage drive to be suddenly unmounted. At best this will cause confusion in the operating system.

Further problems can occur if the device needs to be factory reset - this will wipe the code on the device and will require everything to be re-copied, or possibly loosing work.

In short, using USB Mass Storage mode is a real pain. It would be much simpler to have something that was able to use the Serial mode connection to quickly copy code across without any kind of stateful connection. That is the goal of this project.

Installation

Install using pip:

pip install pybkick

Basic usage

In this example, all my micropython code is in a single, flat directory called 'mpy' which is in the same directory as the script containing the following code:

from pybkick import kick

kick(
	# How do we connect to the pyboard?
    port='/dev/ttyACM0',
    
    # Which files should we copy to the pyboard?
    src=os.path.join(dirname(__file__), 'mpy'), 
)

Advanced usage

In your setup.py file, add 'pybkick' to install_requires. You can also add a script which calls the kick function as an entry point. This will create a command-line utility that can automatically deploy your project to the pyboard.

Limitations

The kick function can only copy flat directories of files into the root directory of the pyboard. It cannot currently handle heirarchical directories or