Installation

Installation

Requirements

• Python 3.10 or newer.
• SEGGER J-Link drivers must be installed on your system. Simplicity Commander uses them to communicate with the adapter. Without them, commands that touch hardware will fail.

You do not need to install Simplicity Commander separately. The PyCommander wheels bundle a platform-appropriate copy of the Simplicity Commander executable and extract it on first use (see Architecture-and-Packages for the details).

Supported platforms

PyCommander ships platform-specific wheels for:

Platform	Architecture
macOS	arm64
Windows	x86 (x64)
Linux	x86_64
Linux	aarch64
Linux	aarch32 (armv7)

Installing

The recommended way to install PyCommander is through the meta-package, which gives you a clean experience and pulls in the right Simplicity Commander flavor for your system:

pip install silabs-pycommander

By default this installs the CLI flavor of Simplicity Commander.

Installing the GUI flavor

To additionally install the GUI version of Simplicity Commander, use the gui extra:

pip install silabs-pycommander[gui]

This installs the GUI version in addition to the CLI version. You can then launch the graphical Simplicity Commander with:

pycommander-gui

Available packages

PyCommander is published as a small family of PyPI packages. End users should install silabs-pycommander; the rest are building blocks.

Package	Purpose
silabs-pycommander	Meta-package for a clean install experience. This is the package end users should install. Pulls in the CLI flavor by default, or the GUI flavor via the [gui] extra.
silabs-pycommander-cli	The CLI version of Simplicity Commander. Depends on pycommander-core.
silabs-pycommander-gui	The GUI version of Simplicity Commander. Depends on pycommander-core. Not advertised, but installable. Install this instead of the CLI version if you only want the GUI.
silabs-pycommander-core	The core Python framework that talks to Simplicity Commander. Not functional on its own — it does not contain the Commander executable. Always a dependency of one of the packages above.

See Architecture-and-Packages for how these relate.

Choosing between CLI and GUI

Both the CLI and GUI versions can coexist peacefully on the same system. A few rules of thumb:

• When you import pycommander or run the pycommander command, the GUI version is used if it is installed; otherwise the CLI version is used.
• You can force a specific flavor by importing the matching package (import pycommander_cli / import pycommander_gui) or by running the matching command (pycommander-cli / pycommander-gui).

Coexisting with an existing Simplicity Commander

Installing PyCommander does not interfere with any existing standalone installation of Simplicity Commander on your system.

⚠️ Shared configuration. All Commander instances on a machine share the same commander.ini configuration file. For example, if you enable command logging using one Commander instance, it will be enabled for all of them.

Verifying the installation

pycommander --version

This prints the PyCommander package version alongside the underlying Simplicity Commander version information. From Python:

from pycommander import Commander

print(Commander().getVersion())

See Getting-Started for your first real commands.