The Adafruit PyPortal is a great little IoT device with lots of projects available. It’s an awesome H/W and S/W platform that inspires many creative ideas. The PyPortal uses an ATMEL (Microchip) ATSAMD51J20, and an Espressif ESP32 Wi-Fi coprocessor. PyPortal has a 3.2″ 320 x 240 color TFT resistive touch screen and has several built-in sensors. It also has support for a micro-SD Card. The device itself shows up as a USB drive when plugged into a computer — but not the micro-SD Card 🙁

Software support for PyPortal is via CircuitPython. There is a great Integrated Development Environment (IDE) available in the form of Mu. Mu is a simple Python editor that also has a built-in serial-port terminal. It allows command-line input of CircuitPython for instant programming, testing, and debugging. This feature is referred to as the REPL (Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop). Deployment of code to a PyPortal is immediate with Mu’s “Save” function.

As I was experimenting with my PyPortal, I wanted to put code and resources (images, fonts, code) on a removable micro-SD Card. Easy to do on my computer but not obvious how to do on PyPortal 🙁 I looked at several PyPortal sample apps and perused CircuitPython docs available on the Explore and Learn Area on the Adafruit websitet

I’m sharing what I learned in a hopefully concise manner to save others time and frustration 😉

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