How to do the set up for Adafruit Circuit Playground Express (CPX) Simulator

The official set up documentation can be visited in their official website

Installation

Install python 3.7+ or check that you are using this version or up of python.

Important information: If you are running python 3.9 +, the device simulator express installation will not work correctly at least that you change de version of one dependency: pillow==7.0.0 to pillow==8.1 (See: website )

How to solve it? Modify the pillow version following the path and modify it in the requirement file: *Unix: .vscode/extensions/ms-python.devicesimulatorexpress-2020.0.36321/out/requirements.txt *Windows:.vscode\extensions\ms-python.devicesimulatorexpress-2020.0.36321\out\requirements.txt or use a previous version of python.

[warning tip]: If you have installed python2 in your system make sure it is not active as your default python command.

Install Visual Studio Code.
Install the Device Simulator Express (Extension from the marketplace). Once it is installed, you will need to reload VScode.

In some cases it is necessary to close it and open again (sometimes a couple of times).

Set up:

Click on the green button Install for Device Simulator Express, after that it will pop-up a message asking if you want to open Visual Studio code.
Click Open Visual Studio Code

Click on the button Open Visual Studio Code, your VSCode should be opened automatically.

At that point, a screen will appear with the Device Simulator Express Installation.

Click Install

If all goes OK, you would be able to don´t see any special screen.

Go to :

View > Command Palette
or use for Mac cmd + shift + p or for Windows/Linux cntl + shift + p

After click Device Simulator Express, you will need to wait some seconds until three options of simulators appear.

In our case will work with “CircuitPlayground Express”. If nothing happens wait a bit more, after a while retry to click again, if not go to the “problems section”.

[Extra info]On these images the purple arrows are indicating different python working version.

Once the different options of simulators appear, we will select the CircuitPlayground Express and the simulator will appear.

After all these steps, we will arrive to the final screen divided in two. On the left, we have some information about a tutorial from the official documentation about CircuitPython and the coding area. On the right, on top we should see a microcontroller (CPX) image.

First steps:

Let´s start writing our first CircuitPython code to test that everything is OK.

On the left write this code:

#import CPX library 

from adafruit_circuitplayground import cp

while True:
    # start your code here
    cp.pixels.fill((0, 250, 0)) #add this line of code
    pass

On the right:
Click on the button play== button with the green arrow. You should see that pixels are turn on green!

-important: Remember save your file as code.py!!

Congrats! Your installation and set up is done, you are ready!

If you didn´t achieve it, don´t worry, go to the possible problems or review the installations and set-up steps.

Possible problems and how to solve them:

The first arrow shows that python2 is running, while on the bottom it looks like it is python 3.7+. Since the running version was python2.7 it was not working.