6. Reset and boot modes

There are soft resets and hard resets.

• A soft reset simply clears the state of the MicroPython virtual machine, but leaves hardware peripherals unaffected. To do a soft reset, simply press Ctrl+D on the REPL, or within a script do:

  import sys
  sys.exit()
  

• A hard reset is the same as performing a power cycle to the board. In order to hard reset the WiPy, press the switch on the board or:

  import machine
  machine.reset()
  

6.1. Safe boot

If something goes wrong with your WiPy, don’t panic! It is almost impossible for you to break the WiPy by programming the wrong thing.

The first thing to try is to boot in safe mode: this temporarily skips execution of boot.py and main.py and gives default WLAN settings.

If you have problems with the filesystem you can format the internal flash drive.

To boot in safe mode, follow the detailed instructions described here.

In safe mode, the boot.py and main.py files are not executed, and so the WiPy boots up with default settings. This means you now have access to the filesystem, and you can edit boot.py and main.py to fix any problems.

Entering safe mode is temporary, and does not make any changes to the files on the WiPy.

6.2. Factory reset the filesystem

If you WiPy’s filesystem gets corrupted (very unlikely, but possible), you can format it very easily by doing:

>>> import os
>>> os.mkfs('/flash')

Resetting the filesystem deletes all files on the internal WiPy storage (not the SD card), and restores the files boot.py and main.py back to their original state after the next reset.