SMARS Lab upgrade with PyCharm

I’ve started to try PyCharm for my Python development, and I have to say I’m impressed. I’ve been using Visual Studio Code for a while now, and I’ve been happy with it, but I wanted to try something new.

I’ve been using PyCharm for a week now, and after a little orientation I’ve found its a powerful tool for Python specific development. It’s a powerful IDE with a lot of features that make Python development easier, specifically the refactoring and debugging tools.

SMARS Quad robot

One of our community members asked for some help getting SMARS Lab running on their SMARS Quad robot. I’ve been aware that this code (which is now over 6 years old) has some issues, mostly to do with the library dependencies that have meant it no longer works out of the box.

I decided to take a look at the old code and do some much needed maintenance to address these issues and to generally tidy up the code using the knowledge I’ve gained over the years since I first wrote it.

My Makers Mantra is “Make it work, make it right, make it fast” and I’ve been following this mantra with the SMARS Lab code. I’ve made it work on the latest Raspberry Pi OS, I’ve made it right by fixing the issues with the code and I’ve made it fast by refactoring the code to make it more efficient.

About SMARS Quad Robots

If you want to build your own SMARS Quad robot, there is a free course available below:

SMARS Quad

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Learn how to build your own SMARS Quad robot

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  4 Mar 23

PyCharm review

In this weeks livestream video we’ll take a closer look at PyCharm and use it make improvements to the existing SMARSLab code.

We’ll also take a look at the SMARS Quad robot and see how it works.

PyCharm particularly excels at code refactoring, and I’ll show you how to use this feature to make the SMARS Lab code more efficient.