I'm going to show you how to get started with your Fire-EdUp platform so that you can begin calculating fire danger ratings and fire danger behavior. We'll get the platform into this state where it calculates new fire danger ratings based on the inputs that you give to these sliders.

Let's start off with a tour of the Fire-EdUp platform. In the top left we have the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller and it's connected to all of these modules by these daisy-chaining cables. We have all of our user inputs. These sliders allow us to set the environmental conditions and the fuel conditions. The graphical display is our primary feedback. It's going to show us the fire danger rating and the behaviour index. We also have an audible alert up in the top right. We can program its behaviour based on the other conditions.

To follow along you'll of course need your Fire-EdUp platform and a USB cable to connect it to your computer. Your computer is also going to need a programming environment called Thonny. We've got a guide linked if you need help getting started installing Thonny.

The Raspberry Pi Pico needs some driver files so that it can talk to all the connected hardware. Find the download section in the article and click the source code link to download the source files. Here we are in my downloads folder and these are the files that I downloaded. Unzip them by right clicking and selecting extract all and extract. Here are my extracted files and if I click into those files a couple of times you can see we've got a folder called modules and a folder called examples. I'm going to move the extracted contents to my documents so that I can find them again easily.

Now we'll open Thonny and set it up. Go to the view menu and make sure that we can see our files on the left here. It's also helpful if we can see the plotter which appears down the bottom right. In the left file pane we'll navigate to where we saved our driver files. I'm under users my user and I'll find my documents and here are the Fire-EdUp drivers. I'll click into this directory and click into modules and there should be a long list of files and now connect your platform to your computer with a USB cable.

In the bottom right corner of your Thonny window select this interpreter button and select MicroPython Raspberry Pi Pico and once we're connected we can see the file pane has split into two windows. On the top we have the files that are on our computer and on the bottom we have files that are stored on the Raspberry Pi Pico. We want to upload all of these files from the modules folder onto the Pico. Left click on the top file and then hold down the shift key and left click on the bottom file to select all the files. Then right click and select upload to or upload to slash. A bit of time passes and we can see we've replicated all of those files onto our Raspberry Pi Pico.

It's time to run some example code. In the file pane you can click up one directory and find the examples folder. Double click example one. Don't worry too much about what's on screen right now. This example is ready to run. You can find the green run script button and just click it.

My Fire-EdUp platform is showing no fire danger rating but as I move these controls I should be able to change that. Let's get started on the same page by setting all the sliders right to the bottom. Now as I move the temperature slider I ought to see that the screen is displaying the live value for temperature that I'm selecting. So all the way up the top it's showing 51-degrees and all the way down the bottom it's showing zero. I'm going to select a pretty balmy day at about 25-26 degrees. I can increase the wind speed now to about 20-21 kilometers per hour and the fuel load I'll increase to about 20 tons per hectare. Once those values are captured we can see the display is showing a high fire danger. But what if I increase the fuel moisture content now? I'll increase it all the way up to 20 and we're back down to a moderate fire danger. What about the humidity? If the humidity becomes quite high at 82% relative humidity then we're back down to no rating. So we can see as we play with these values the same amount of fuel and the same temperature day the danger is going to be a little bit different depending on the other parameters that we choose.

Very dry fuel on a very dry day that's very hot and has very high wind is going to have a higher fire danger. If I increase that fuel load all the way to the end then we can find it's catastrophic fire danger under these conditions.

If we turn our attention back to Thonny for a moment I've zoomed out so we can see all the text that's coming up the shell and this is just the data that we're extracting from our user inputs. So we can see here on the left column is wind and if I decrease the wind we should see that value changes as well. The next value is fuel and I can shrink that value as well. If I go over to my plotter we can see that these lines represent the state of these sliders so as I change each slider the line in the plotter also changes.

Let's do a quick code remix. I used ctrl C to stop the code from executing and now we can change it. In the code here we're setting things like the vegetation model here we're using button grass. We set the slope in degrees. In an infinite loop we collect the data from our user inputs and here we're printing the data. That's where this information in the shell is coming from to make our plots. I'm going to comment this out with a hash. Down here we're calculating the fire danger and there's a commented outline just below it where we're printing the FBI, the fire behaviour index. I'll uncomment that by deleting that hash. Now when I run the script again you can press the green button or press ctrl R. In the shell now we're printing a new value, just one value for the fire behaviour index. As I slide these sliders around we can see how that FBI changes both in the shell and in the plotter. As I decrease the fuel load the FBI should fall dramatically. As I increase the temperature it should go up. As I decrease the humidity or increase the wind speed it should go up. There you have it. Now we can run a simple code remix to change the behaviour of how the Fire-EdUp platform behaves. And I'll just press ctrl C to halt that script.

Now we've been running the script from our computer so far. We've been pressing that green run button or pressing ctrl R. When we do that, that code is briefly moved over onto the Pico but it doesn't stay there. We still need to be tethered to the computer to run the code. If you'd like to set up your Pico so that it executes this code every single time it powers on then you can take the example file and save it as. Then save it to Raspberry Pi Pico as a special file name main.py. We can see that main.py file has appeared and the name of our file here has changed to main.py. These square brackets are telling us that this is a file stored on the Pico directly. Now if we unplug the Pico and plug it back in, it starts running the code immediately and I should be able to play with these sliders and change the values. I didn't have to interact with Thonny at all. However, because we didn't connect to the Pico with Thonny, we don't see those printouts in the shell. But we can just go down to the bottom right and select our Raspberry Pi Pico and we're back into familiar territory. We can either run from the file that's already on our Pico or press ctrl D to automatically execute main.py that's on the Pico. And you can see we're back to familiar territory printing the messages that we saw before. And so there you have it. We were able to download the source files to make the Fire-EdUp platform work and we even ran an example that takes our user inputs for environmental and fuel conditions and converts it into a fire danger rating and FBI. I'll see you in the next video where we start to do some programming of our own."