"Magic Commands" in Jupyter Notebook not supported to set environment variable

I’m trying to work with Blinka in Jupyter Notebook, and it seems to work only if I set the required environment variable in the command prompt before running the kernel. Since I’m running Anaconda on Windows, this would look like:

set BLINKA_NOVA=1
jupyter notebook

If I do this, I can import board with no problem.

If I try to run the magic command or shell command in a Jupyter Notebook cell, it does not seem to work: !set BLINKA_NOVA=1 or %env BLINK_NOVA=1 I can see that the variable has been set by calling !set or %env. However, when I run import board I get the Board not supported None error message. I’m not sure if this is a bug in Blinka or Jupyter Notebook, but any help would be appreciated!

[willingc]

I would recommend following @makermelissa’s suggestion to set the environment variable globally. The reason that it can be done in Mac/Linux is that it uses a different type of shell than Windows. Here’s an article from Jake Vanderplas’ book that explains a bit more: https://jakevdp.github.io/PythonDataScienceHandbook/01.05-ipython-and-shell-commands.html

It’s not a bug but a limitation of the Windows operating system. If you are using Windows Subsytem Linux, I believe that the command will work (though I haven’t tried it since I don’t have a Windows system handy). Good luck @ShawnHymel. FYI you can ask questions about Jupyter in the Jupyter Discourse site too (http://discourse.jupyter.org).

[makermelissa]

@ShawnHymel, Another option that might work is to search for env in your run bar on Windows and go to Edit the system environment variable and set a system variable through there. Then it should be system wide. You may need to reboot after doing that.