✏️ Editing with a More Powerful Editor Copy

You now have the basics to set up a program. Let’s try using something a bit more powerful to help us program with more than just the command line. This step is entirely optional but will help you program faster and help you fix mistakes.

To start, we will need two programs:

Pycharm, a Python editor. Make sure you select your operating system and the community version.

For Windows: WinSCP. This will let us connect to the files on the Pi easily

For Mac: Filezilla. Like WinSCP but for Mac

Go ahead and install Pycharm and either WinSCP or Filezilla.

Windows

Open WinSCP and enter this information to connect to the Pi:

Click login and you will be able to see all the files on the Pi.

Navigate to Betabox-PiCar-Template and we can open car.py with PyCharm. Right click on car.py go to Edit > Edit With…

Click browse and go to C:Program FilesJetBrainsPyCharm Community Edition 2018.3.5bin and click on pycharm.exe.

Click Remember This Editor to perform this action quicker in the future.

You should now be able to open the Python file with PyCharm! PyCharm can help you fix mistakes and correct things. It also has a nice color coded interface to help you stay organized! Check out their website here for more information.

When you are done editing with Pycharm, go to File > Save All to save and then go back to PuTTY to run your script from there!

Note: You will not be able to operate out of Pycharm because the files are located on the Pi for the script to work.