Welcome to Snakie 🐍¶
Snakie is a friendly app for writing code that runs on tiny computers.
Those tiny computers are called microcontrollers — little boards like the Raspberry Pi Pico. You plug one into your computer with a USB cable, write some MicroPython code in Snakie, press Run, and watch your board do things: blink a light, spin a motor, read a sensor.
Snakie also does some things most code editors can't:
- 🔭 It draws a picture of your board and shows which pins your code is using.
- 📟 It has on-screen instruments — an oscilloscope, a multimeter and a plotter — that show live readings from your program.
- 🧩 It has a Parts Library so you can drop in sensors and motors and wire them up.
- 🤖 It has a 3-D Robot View where you can build a robot from parts and pose it.
It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux (including the Raspberry Pi).
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New here? Start here
Install Snakie and run your very first program.
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Tutorials
Step-by-step lessons. Great if you like to learn by doing.
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How-to guides
Short recipes for a specific task, like "connect to my board".
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Reference
The details: keyboard shortcuts, file formats and APIs.
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Explanation
The "why" and "how it works" behind Snakie's features.
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Snakie is open source
The app lives on GitHub. Downloads are on the Releases page.
How these docs are organised¶
We follow a plan called Diátaxis that splits docs into four kinds, so you can find the right help fast:
| If you want to… | Go to |
|---|---|
| Learn by following along | Tutorials |
| Do one specific thing | How-to guides |
| Look up a fact or format | Reference |
| Understand how something works | Explanation |
Never used a microcontroller before?
That's totally fine — Snakie is a great place to start. Read What is MicroPython? for a gentle introduction, then jump into Blink an LED.