Development Environment
Before we start learning to code, we need to set up our development and testing environment.
Brick Viewer and Brick Daemon
For the LiFi-project, your team uses hardware from a small German start-up company called Tinkerforge. To jump-start working with the hardware components, Tinkerforge provides two pieces of software, both are open source:
The Brick Daemon is a small service that runs in the background of your computer and allows working with a hardware stack that is connected to your computer via USB.
The Brick Viewer is a small software application with a graphical user interface (GUI). This software allows connecting to the hardware devices and test their functionality using a graphical interface.
Both software are available for the operating systems (OS) Windows, Mac, and Linux. A description for each operating system is available on the Tinkerforge documentation website.
Visual Studio Code
When we write a program, we type so-called instructions into a text file. The text file can have a specific file extension, which differs depending on which programming language the program is written in. Your team develops the necessary software using the Python programming language, and the file extension for Python is .py.
To edit a Python program, we could use any text editor already installed on our computer. If we are running Windows, we could open Notepad and write our program. However, Notepad does not provide any features that are helpful for writing a program in Python (apart from typing text). That's why we are going to use a text editor that is specifically tailored to writing programs with Python, or any other programming language for that matter. We call such a text editor an Integrated Development Environment, or IDE.
What do we mean by that? Here are some of the features that an IDE like Visual Studio has and that you will soon learn to appreciate yourself:
Syntax highlighting: an IDE can recognize the programming language and highlight certain keywords of the language in bold or a specific color. This makes code much easier to read.
Code completion: when we type the first letters of a command, a good IDE can guess what this command is and complete the name for us. This saves us a lot of typing, and we do not have to remember all the commands.
Code formatting: while in some programming languages such as JavaScript, formatting our code is helpful to improve the readability, in Python the formatting is actually part of the syntax. This means that there is a difference in having an extra tab or not. An IDE knows how to format code in a specific programming languages and can either give us useful hints or format the code with the push of a button for us altogether.
Warnings and errors: a good IDE can warn us about mistakes we make before we run the code. For instance, when we mistype the name of a variable, we get a warning that this variable is unknown. Even better, we might get the option to correct the spelling error with a click.
Debugging: when we write code, we expect it to do certain things, but occasionally, it doesn't work the way we thought it would. When this happens, we say there's an error in our code, and we call these errors 'bugs'. Finding bugs in our code can be hard, but luckily, we can get some help from our IDE. Most IDEs have a special execution mode called 'debugging', which lets us go through our code step by step and see what's happening to things like variables at each step. This is really helpful for identifying where the bug is hiding, or for figuring out that our code isn't doing what we thought it would.
You can download and install Visual Studio Code for any operating system from the following website:
Extension for Python
For features like syntax highlighting or code completion to work when programming in Python, Microsoft provides an extension for Visual Studio Code. You should install the extension from the Visual Studio Code Extensions menu. Click on the symbol that looks like a jigsaw puzzle, and then click in the search field and type "Python". It should be the first result in the list. Click on "Install" and you're done!
Python
Python is a widely adopted programming language that is especially well suited for first-time-programmers. To run Python programs on our computer, we must install it first. You can download Python in the latest version from the following website:
On Windows, Python comes as an executable file with the extension .exe. Save the file anywhere on your hard drive and double-click on it when the download has finished. When you do, the first window appears that looks similar to the one in the screenshot below:
Make sure you check the boxes "Use admin privileges when installing py.exe" and "Add python.exe to PATH". The former ensures that Python can write anywhere on your computer, which is important when you install packages later. The latter enables you to use Python from anywhere on your computer. We'll use Python mostly from the command line (or terminal), and with this setting, we can type python regardless of which folder we are in.
Next, click "Install Now", no need to customize the installation. When the installation has finished, you see the following screen:
Click "Close" and you're done with this step.
Git
In software development, we often work in teams and need to share code with our team members. This is similar to when you want to work on a text document or a spreadsheet together with your classmates. It would be nice to have a tool that helps you with that. Git is that tool, and you'll use it in this course primarily to get the example code for the LiFi-project from the provided GitHub repository. Download and install Git on your computer:
When you have successfully installed all the software listed above, you are done with this lesson. Next, you test whether everything works using a so-called smoke test.
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