OK it works. So for future reference this is what I did:

Turn on the unit (mine is an M5StickC with UIFlow 1.6.6 firmware) press the M5 button quickly after that to enter setup mode (my screen shows <code>) side button to get the Setup menu M5 again to select it Switch Mode M5 again side button to select APP side button to select '..' at top M5 to go back to previous menu side button to select Reboot M5 to reboot

From now on whenever you turn it on the Stick will run boot.py and then main.py in the /flash directory.

If when it's so running you attach the device to a computer via the USB cable, you can interrupt whatever it is doing by starting Thonny and hitting ctrl-F2 (Stop/Restart Backend), which will bring up the MicroPython REPL prompt. Cool.

When devices start up, go to setting and set connection mode to USB. Default is set to Wifi/usb.

Hello @WonkoTheSane

Hmm, did you include the line from m5stack import *?

I have UIFlow 1.6.6 firmware installed on my M5StickC Plus and use Blockly's Set screen brightness block then switched to the Python tab.

Thanks
Felix

@mb You need to read a bit about py and c++ difference

Hello @toddkrein

you are correct, there is no RTC battery backup in M5Stack Fire.

Please note: In sleep modes time accuracy might be affected depending on the clock source used.

Please also refer to:
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/api-reference/system/system_time.html

Cheers
Felix

I'm trying to do this on the M5StickC and the "mkdir" command doesn't work. It just says "NameError: name 'mkdir' isn't defined"

Is there a different module on the M5StickC that holds these file system commands?

In order to type commands into the console you need to hit ctrl + c to kill any running processes on the device

Thanks for sharing @jeff looks cool

@m5stack I will share pseudo-codes of the current implementation, which is stable so far:

CycleTimer = Timer(-1) def main(): # init and connect mqtt client doCycle() def doCycle(): global CycleTimer # send stuff from mqtt # NOTE: do not use machine.lightsleep() as publish() is NOT synchronous # lightsleep() will block data from being sent CycleTimer.init(period=5000, mode=Timer.ONE_SHOT, callback=doCycle)

NOTE: this is power-intensive; calling lightsleep() will cause uiflow's mqtt client to crash quickly.

@rapgo Your requirement is vague: what exactly are you trying to control?