Construction of the WiPy board is trivial.
- Insert the WiPy board into the expansion board. The pins will go in the center row of female headers! Follow the silkscreen outline to get the board inserted properly; the reset button on the WiPy should be over the USB connector on the expansion board.
- Plug the LiPo battery into the JST connector.
- Plug a micro-B USB cable into the expansion board and then plug it into a power source. I have mine connected to a powered USB hub, but your laptop should provide enough power, as will a wall adapter or multi-port USB charger like the Anker.
That's it. Your WiPy will be up and running, ready for programming! Notice that MicroPython comes pre-flashed on the WiPy board, unlike the ESP8266, so you don't have to do anything to install it.
The WiPy board boots into WiFi AP mode, so it creates its own WiFi network when it starts up. This is part of the factory firmware. The WiPi will be at the IP address 192.168.1.1 The WiFi network will be named wipy-wlan-something where "something" is a small set of hex numbers. Connect your laptop's WiFi to that network using the password www.wipy.io (I have not found a way to change this default)
On Mac OS X, click on the WiFi icon in the toolbar. The drop-down will give you a list of available WiFi networks. Click on the one that starts with wipy-wlan-...
The system will then bring up a dialog box for you to enter the WiFi password. This will be "www.wipy.io".
Then just click "Join". Windows and Linux have similar methods for attaching to new WiFi networks. Remember, you need to do this on your laptop, which is where you will be editing the configuration files!
Once you have connected to the WiPy's network, you can access the device. To get to the Read-Evaluate-Print Loop (REPL) prompt on the board, telnet to 192.168.1.1
You will be prompted to log in. The login is micro and the password is python
While this is the default, it can be changed in the boot sequence. See the image below for an example of a successful telnet connection to the WiPy REPL.
Telnet is a program that connects to a remote system and emulates a terminal so you can log in on and interact with the system remotely. It was the predecessor to SSH. Telnet has fallen into disuse because it has security exposures that cannot be fixed. It originated with UNIX systems in the late 1970's and early 1980's. It was how we used to connect to remote systems.
Mac OS X comes with a telnet client (and an ftp client), so you don't have to do anything special to install one on those systems.
On Linux systems, you use your local package manager (which is distro-dependent) to install the ftp and telnet packages.
On Windows, things are a bit more complicated. There is a Microsoft TechNet article on installing telnet. For ftp, the most popular solution is the free FileZilla program. Download and install the client application.
After you log in you will see the Python >>> prompt. The system is now ready for you to type Python code into it. As of this writing, the board ships with MicroPython v1.6-89-g440d33a.
MicroPython is Python3, so Python2 code will need to be converted to Python3 in order to run. This isn't a big deal if you are writing code from scratch but some older code might need slight adjustments
Here is a screen shot of the telnet session showing the connection process and successful REPL execution:
