I'm playing with a borrowed Raspberry Pi Pico W, and thought I'd play with MicroPython on it. That software platform seems to have support direct from Raspberry Pi, which is always promising. I thought perhaps it might even get equal billing with the traditional C-based platform! Well, as soon as I opened up Raspberry Pi Pico Python SDK ebook I knew they were not equal. Despite the usual warning not to judge a book by its cover or length, the fact is there are 54 pages in the Python SDK ebook which is barely 10% of its counterpart C SDK ebook's 523 pages.

But I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing. The advantage of a smaller book is that it's easier for people to read through and absorb, which aligns with the goal of having Python on a microcontroller to begin with. The book frequently refers the reader to the C book for details not specific to the language, such as details on working with the programmable input/output (PIO) blocks. Writing PIO code is little different from writing in assembly language, and a challenge I intend to tackle sometime in the future.

I was happy to see the prebuilt MicroPython distribution binary for Raspberry Pi Pico W was generated by MicroPython organization, instead of a separate fork maintained by Raspberry Pi. This should mean features are introduced in step with the rest of the MicroPython ecosystem and not lagging behind waiting for someone else to integrate upstream changes.

Another item I was happy to see was a Visual Studio Code extension to ease working with MicroPython. MicroPico, formerly Pico-W-Go, promises a lot of convenience over using a serial terminal like PuTTY, which was what I did before. I've become familiar with VSCode so I'll use the extension first, but people without such affinity have other options like the popular Python IDE "Thonny" and a command-line based "rshell" tool that should be useful for scripting.