1. Open Mu Editor.

2. Turn on the STELLA, and plug it in to your computer.

3. Click on the Serial button at the top of the Mu window.

4. In the Serial Dialogue panel that opens at the bottom of the Mu window, you should see a line of text that loads every second:
“Memory B: Used xxxxxx /Free xxxxxx recording…”
That tells you that Mu is communicating properly with the STELLA.

5. Open the Finder (on a Mac) (File Explorer in Windows). Find the CIRCUITPY drive in the Mle list. Click on it to load it into the
window. You should see three items: boot_out.txt, code.py, and a folder called lib.

6. In another Finder/Explorer window your computer, in the code files that you downloaded for programming the STELLA, open the folder called test_codes. In there you should find a folder called real_time_clock, and in that folder you should Mnd a Mle named code.py

7. Copy that code.py file, and paste it onto the CIRCUITPY drive. (Drag and drop should also work) The system will ask you if you want to replace the existing code.py file, and you should choose to Replace.

8. Now go back to the Mu window. In the Serial panel it should be printing out the date and time, once a second. That shows that you have the real time clock test code running on the STELLA. The STELLA screen itself should be either blank, or showing the same printout as you are seeing in the Serial dialogue.

9. Now click on the Load button at the top of the Mu editor. You should see the contents of the CIRCUITPY drive. If you see some other contents, change the choices so that you are looking at the CIRCUITPY drive. (If you save a Mle somewhere else on the computer, it will not run on the STELLA, but Mu doesn’t warn you about that, or offer a Save As button to correct that)

10. In the Load window, select the code.py Mle on the CIRCUITPY drive, and the real time clock test code should load in the Mu window.

11. There is a line of code that reads “if False”. Change that line to “if True”. It’s important to get the capitalization correct (lower
case if, upper case T in True).

12. Open a web browser window, and navigate to time.is/UTC to get a readout of the current global universal time.

13. A few lines below the “if True” line is a line “t = time.struct_time((…))” That line is a bit out of date by now. Change the line as
follows: I’m setting my STELLA as I am writing this, so the line now should read:
t = time.struct_time(( 2022, 09, 30, 19, 38, 00, 5, -1, -1))
I’ve set the seconds to 00. 5 designates the day as Friday, and the -1, -1 tells the clock not to set the day of the year or ‘is daylight
savings’ Melds.

14. Wait for the web UTC clock to get within two seconds of the time you’ve put in the time.struct line, and then click the Save button at the top of the Mu editor. That sets the real time clock module on the STELLA. The printout in the Serial panel should show
the correct time now.

15. To make sure we don’t save again and reset the time incorrectly, change the “if True” line to “if False”. Then save the code again. The Serial printout should continue to show the correct time.

16. Now go back to the Finder/ Explorer, and locate the STELLA-AQ-code-and-libraries folder. . Copy the code.py from there to the CIRCUITPY drive, choose to Replace the existing file, and the STELLA should run the full instrumentation, now with the correct time.