Getting Started

At the moment installation is from the GitHub repo source. In the future we would like to add mip and better stub file support.

Installation

Ultimo can be installed from github via mip. For most use-cases you will probably want to install ultimo_machine which will also insatll the core ultimo package:

>>> mip.install("github:unital/ultimo/src/ultimo_machine/package.json")

or using mpremote:

mpremote mip install github:unital/ultimo/src/ultimo_machine/package.json

You can separately install ultimo_display from github:unital/ultimo/src/ultimo_display/package.json and if you just want the core ultimo without any hardware support, you can install github:unital/ultimo/src/ultimo/package.json.

Development Installation

To simplify the development work-cycle with actual hardware, there is a helper script in the ci directory which will download the files onto the device. You will need an environment with mpremote and click installed. For example, on a Mac/Linux machine:

python -m venv ultimo-env
source ultimo-env/bin/activate
pip install mpremote click

should give you a working environment.

Ensure that the Pico is plugged in to your computer and no other program (such as Thonny or an IDE) is using it. You can then execute:

python -m ci.deploy_to_device

and this will install the ultimo code in the /lib directory (which is on sys.path) and the examples in the main directory (with example drivers in /devices).

Running the Examples

The example code works with the Pico and it’s internal hardware, plus some basic external hardware (buttons, potentiometers, motion sensors). A couple of examples use a Waveshare LCD1602 RGB or similar I2C-based 16x2 character displays.

Most examples can be run from inside an IDE like Thonny. A couple need better serial console support than Thonny provides, and so may need to use mpremote, screen or other terminal emulators.

Warning

As of the initial release, the examples have only been run on a Raspberry Pi Pico. They probably will work on other supported hardware with appropriate modification for pin locations, etc.

Writing Code Using Ultimo

Althought Ultimo is a Micropython library, it provides .pyi stub files for typing support. If you add the ultimo sources to the paths where tools like mypy and pyright look for stubs (in particular, pip install -e ... will likely work), then you should be able to get type-hints for the code you are writing in your IDE or as a check step as part of your CI.