Running Code and Testing experiments without pycubed board

[Buneabt]

Hi,

Currently I am an undergrad student at Uni, and our school is currently restarting a project on creating a 3U cube sat. I was pointed in this direction to get an idea of how a codebase should look like, and I wanted to ask if it is possible to emulate a pycubed board in order to run the experiments in the "basics" task folder. Currently I don't have my hands on a pycubed board but I do have access to several pumpkin boards that the previous team left behind(if that can help). I'm really new to all of this and just needed some help getting started and pointed in the right direction.

[polygnomial]

Because CircuitPython is very similar to Python, it's possible to emulate. See this example from the PyCubed-Mini folks: https://pocketqube.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

However, you miss out on some very important nuances of embedded programming. The speed of your computer is much faster (a couple GHz) than the SAMD51 (which runs at 120 MHz), and has much more RAM and storage.

You could also start prototyping on a different board. A Feather M4 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3857), or another board with a SAMD51 can run much of the same code that can run on the PyCubed. You can buy breakout boards for some of the sensors (i.e. https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/dfrobot/SEN0373/13590881 for the BMX160), and you can also get a LoRa featherwing.

[maholli]

Thank you for chiming in @polygnomial. Very appreciated! :)

@polygnomial 's suggestion of a FeatherM4 board is likely your best option to get started. The difficult part for someone just starting off is figuring out which pieces need to be disabled in order to run outside of a pycubed board. This is something I've wanted to write up and document but have never found the time. Maybe someone in the community has pieced together something similar? BTW: you can also run circuitpython on your computer (and it's especially easy on RPIs/single board computers), but you run into the same hurdles described above. Ultimately (and the nice thing about circuitpython) you'll just need to load the example scripts from the tutorials and start disabling parts that it yells about in the REPL. Once you have something that can run, you can start investigating the pieces you disabled and seeing how you can add it back in (usually with some adafruit breakout board).

• It's only a start, but I actually wrote a small bit on using a featherM4 board as a "ground station" as part of the beep-sat (basic) tutorial. See here.

The pumpkin boards are a whole different beast and likely wont be much use at this stage.

[Buneabt]

Thank you both for the fast replies, I'll work towards getting a Feather M4 board and working around with that regarding getting started.