About the Pixel Kit

The retail Pixel Kit uses an ESP32 (The classic one) (ESP-WROOM-32) with 4MB of flash, which makes it very easy to put things like WLED, Arduino, MicroPython, and CircuitPython onto it.

Flashing CircuitPython onto Your Pixel Kit

To flash CircuitPython onto it, either use Thonny (A python editor for basically anything) or esptool (A Python-based CLI tool for ESP32)

Thonny:

1. Click Tools (in bar on top)
2. Select "Options..."
3. Select "Interpreter"
4. Click the dropdown and select CircuitPython (generic)
5. Click the underlined text "esptool", this tells Thonny to flash to ESP32
6. Select the COM (Windows) or dev/cu.usbmodem (Mac) (Could also be dev/tty.usbserial) port in the Target Port dropdown
7. For family select ESP32 (This is what the Pixel Kit has)
8. For variant select DOIT • ESP32 Development Board
9. Select what CircuitPython version you want in the version dropdown
10. Click Install
11. Close the installer window
12. Select the port for your device
13. Click the stop button (Stop/Restart Backend)
14. Install the necessary libraries from the bundle in their documentation. neopixel, adafruit_framebuf, adafruit_pixel_framebuf, and led_animation
15. Download the CircuitPython PixelKit library from my GitHub repo (PixelKit.py) https://github.com/colinvail6/pixelkit-lib
16. Install it to /lib
17. Play around with the Pixel Kit!

esptool:

1. Install esptool. This can be done using pip install esptool (Python 2 and lower) or pip3 install esptool (Python 3 and newer)
2. Open your Terminal app (Terminal on Mac, Command Prompt on Windows, Bash on Linux)
3. Erase the flash on your board. This can be done using esptool --port %PORT% --chip esp32 erase_flash (Python 2 or lower) or python -m esptool --port %PORT% --chip esp32 erase_flash (Python 3 and newer)
4. Download the CircuitPython binary from https://circuitpython.org/board/doit_esp32_devkit_v1/
5. Run cd Downloads
6. Flash the CircuitPython binary to your Pixel Kit. This can be done using esptool --port %PORT% --chip esp32 write_flash -z 0x0 adafruit-circuitpython-doit_esp32_devkit_v1-en_US-10.0.3.bin (Python 2 or lower) or python -m esptool --port %PORT% --chip esp32 write_flash -z 0x0 adafruit-circuitpython-doit_esp32_devkit_v1-en_US-10.0.3.bin (Python 3 and newer)
7. Download the CircuitPython PixelKit library from my GitHub repo (PixelKit.py) https://github.com/colinvail6/pixelkit-lib
8. Install it to /lib
9. Play around with the Pixel Kit!