Speed up Visual Studio Code Remote Development

These are the two you need to disable.

I’m writing all the code for the red telephone project in JavaScript as a node application. This is because it makes it very easy to host a website on the phone. Also I need a lot of multi-threading and events stuff and JavaScript’s await and async stuff makes this so easy to write. Also, I like writing JavaScript.

I’m writing the code on the Raspberry Pi W that is powering the phone. This is a really useful thing to be able to do. I can set breakpoints which are triggered when hardware events occur. Then I can step through the code. I’m using Visual Studio Code, but the environment is running on my PC and I’m using the amazing Remote Development feature to develop on the Pi. But it is not without its problems. When I started doing this, things would work fine for a while and then suddenly the Raspberry Pi would lock up and progress would grind to a halt.

I did some searching and thanks to this wonderful post I discovered how to fix it. It turns out that some of the language plugins for Visual Studio Code consume humungous amounts of computer power. And when they wake up on the Raspberry Pi it is pretty much game over for development on the machine. If you search the extensions for “@builtin type” and then disable the two shown above you’ll find that things work swimmingly. You miss out on a few useful goodies, and you’ll have to re-enable these to get them back, but in the meantime at least you’ll be able to do useful work on a device costing less than a couple of burgers and fries.

Visual Studio Code on Raspberry Pi is awesome

I’ve been using Visual Studio Code remote development on my Raspberry Pi devices for a while, but what I’d really like to do is just run Visual Studio Code on the Raspberry Pi itself. And now I can.

sudo apt update 
sudo apt install code -y

All I had to do was open up a command prompt and type the two commands above. And then I had an extra option for programming and using all the lovely Visual Studio Code plugins.

This is wonderful, wonderful, news. I’ve installed the Platform IO plugin and I now have a completely self-contained system for development on the Pi. I’m using the Pi 400 device which has a fair amount of processing power. It’s not as fast as my desktop - but then it cost a tiny fraction of the price. And it does get there in the end. Such good news.

Writing MicroPython using Visual Studio Code and Pymakr

I’m starting to really, really, like MicroPython. I particularly like the way that you can use the REPL command prompt to test out code before dropping it into your programs. I’ve been using an editor called Thonny which is nice enough but of course what I really want is to be able to use Visual Studio Code. It turns out that there’s a plugin for this. It’s called Pymakr. It lets you transfer Python files between your PC and your MicroPython device and provides a REPL prompt too. If you want to use it you have to install Node.js first. I did this and then found that it didn’t work. My MicroPython board was not detected.

I was using one of my Doit boards which usually works fine. (I’ve just bought another one….) It turns out that Pymakr maintains a list of USB devices that it is willing to connect with. You need to make sure that your device is on the list in the configuration file Pymakr.json. Use the command Pymakr>Global Setting to open this file and then add your device manufacture to the list, like I’ve done below.

Note that this is not the the manufacturer of your device, it is the manufacturer of the USB interface that the device uses to connect to the PC.

You can find the name that you need by opening Device Manager, right-clicking the com port where your board is connected and then getting the manufacturer name from the properties page:

I did this and everything started working. The Pymakr plugin has a nifty feature where it will copy all the Python files in your project into the device, or only copy the ones that you’ve changed. Very nifty.

If you’ve not played with MicroPython before I’ve written a tiny guide that you might find useful. You can find it here.

Visual Studio Code is growing on me

You learn something new every day. Today I learned that if you don’t enable the C++ extension in Visual Studio Code you can’t use any of the Arduino extension commands.

Visual Studio Code is really growing on me. It’s like a software Swiss Army knife. It wraps around your code development and there are some awesome plugins. Including an amazing one for working with MarkDown (Markdown All in One). And the GitHub integration is lovely useful.