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  • Author Author: Workshopshed
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Setting up a Python Development Environment

Workshopshed

Since realising that I could do some of the hard work for interpreting the weather APIs in Python I thought I'd check out my options for IDEs. I've been brought up for the last 20 years on Microsoft Visual Studio so I am used to having a featured IDE with projects, source control integration, debugger and intelli-sense.

 

I also did not want to work with copying files to the SD card manually.

 

I found PyCharm by the people who do Resharper that I use at work. There was a community edition which was a free license and seemed ideal for this project. The IDE also supports plugins for SCP (to sync the files to the Yun) and GitHub (my selected source control)

image

I used a simple script to find the version of Python installed

Import sys
print (sys.version)

 

2.7.3 (default, Sep 14 2014, 18:44:39)
[GCC 4.6.3 20120201 (prerelease)]

 

So I ensured that I also had Python 2.7 installed locally.

 

The GitHub functionality is already installed, when I opened up the project it detected that it was using Git. Because I was using the simple GitHub UI the Git.exe was not installed so I downloaded that and installed to the default folder and pointed PyCharm at that directory. The UI guided me through a commit, merge and push to get my code changes synced up as I'd made changes to the same file on two different machines.

 

To sync files using SCP a plugin is needed.

image

This also needs to be configured with the IP address of the Yun which I've made sticky via my router.

 

I did not have much to debug but the debugger seemed fairly straightforward, running code without debugging is also straight forward.

 

There seemed to be quite a lot on the menus so I've removed some of the plugins that I don't think I'll be using.

 

It seems to be a good platform to work with and a low learning curve. I'll keep you updated if I find any problems with the workflow or use of the tool.