Using pyControl on a Teensy or without a breakout board

[jonahpearl]

Hi all — I apologize if this has already been discussed; I recall seeing a discussion about it before, but I can't find it right now. What is the viability of using pyControl on either 1) a different microcontroller like a Teensy 4.0, or 2) a pyBoard but without the pyControl breakout board? The breakout board is a bit of a limiting factor, both price- and time-wise.

I see that the microPython port for Teensy is fully different than that for the pyBoard, and that since pyControl is written with the pyb library, it would be a lot of work to port it to Teensy. I think it would be a valuable thing to do, but probably no one wants to spend that time.

Re using pyControl on just a pyBoard attached to a standard breakout board instead of the pyControl-specific one, it seems like all one would have to do is have some pyControl classes that allow selection of precise pin numbers, instead of eg "port 1" or "bnc 2". For example, I currently run an odor presentation paradigm with a Teensy 4, and all the Teensy does is 1) turn pins high / low at the correct times, 2) broadcast / record various TTL signals, 3) record an analog input, 4) send serial data to Python for recording. I know that pyControl could easily do 1-3, and for 4, I wouldn't have to do it if the data were saved by pyControl instead.

I'm tempted to buy a stand-alone pyBoard and try it, but I am wondering if I'll run into various deep seated errors, for example if pyControl expects to find certain peripherals attached to the board, but does not.

Thanks!

[ThomasAkam]

Hi @jonahpearl,

You can certainly use pyControl with a pyboard with no breakout board. The pyControl Digital_input, Digital_output and Analog_input classes can all be instantiated using pin number directly, e.g. button = Digital_input(pin='X1', rising_event='button_press', falling_event='button_release'). See the hardware docs here.

Currently pyControl is only compatible with pyboard hardware for two reasons. i) The pyControl framework uses the pyb module that is pyboard specific. ii) The Pycboard class which provides the interface between the GUI and the pyboard hardware is likely also pyboard specific, though i have not tested this or tried to adapt it to work with other boards. It would be great to modify pyControl to work with other micropython boards but it would potentially be quite a bit of work.