A Confetti Bot With Raspberry Pi @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

Some day robots may take over the planet. They may act in defiance of all Asimovian rules. They may run their own robotic society, full of robot goals and robot dreams and robot lives. And on the offhand chance they have robot parties, this DIY confetti popping robotics project may help this future robot society with their festive days. Here’s more from Instructables:

Are you tired of boring celebrations with the same old confetti popping techniques? You can now design your very own confetti-popping robot with a big red button that will make your parties a colorful blast, literally! With this robot, you’ll become the life of the party with just one press of a button. Whether it’s a birthday party, a wedding, a company launch, or just a random Wednesday night, this robot will add an extra dimension of fun and excitement to any event.

In this instructable, you’ll learn how to build your very own confetti bot using Viam.

This robot turns a motor when you press a button, which then sets off a confetti cannon and makes it rain confetti.

See more!

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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

The Raspberry Pi 5 is announced! #PiDay @Raspberry_Pi

On the heels of the global supply shortage easing comes information from Cambridge on the Raspberry Pi 5.

There are many new features, many requested by the community and enthusiasts for modern computing, per the Raspberry Pi Blog:

• 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU
• VideoCore VII GPU, supporting OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.2
• Dual 4Kp60 HDMI® display output
• 4Kp60 HEVC decoder
• Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi®
• Bluetooth 5.0 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
• High-speed microSD card interface with SDR104 mode support
• 2 × USB 3.0 ports, supporting simultaneous 5Gbps operation
• 2 × USB 2.0 ports
• Gigabit Ethernet, with PoE+ support (requires separate PoE+ HAT, coming soon)
• 2 × 4-lane MIPI camera/display transceivers
• PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for fast peripherals
• Raspberry Pi standard 40-pin GPIO header
• Real-time clock
• Power button

Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton states:

Priced at $60 for the 4GB variant, and $80 for its 8GB sibling (plus your local taxes), virtually every aspect of the platform has been upgraded, delivering a no-compromises user experience. Raspberry Pi 5 comes with new features, it’s over twice as fast as its predecessor, and it’s the first Raspberry Pi computer to feature silicon designed in‑house here in Cambridge, UK.

According to Raspberry Pi, subscribers of The MagPi or HackSpace Magazine will get “Priority Boarding” for obtaining a Pi 5. With Priority Boarding, one can pre-order a Raspberry Pi 5 (4 GB or 8 GB) and it’ll get sent out at the front of the shipping queue. Raspberry Pi states boards will ship in late October 2023.

Authorized resellers have their own policies. Adafruit has signups for Pi 5 boards and accessories at adafruit.com/new (note this is not preorder).

Making dioramas with animated GIFs and CircuitPython @hajime_araiso

@hajime_araiso on X (formerly Twitter) writes (via Google Translate):

Yesterday, I was able to play GIF animations at high speed using CircuitPython, so I reinstalled circuitpython into the 1/12 Aikatsu mini chassis prototype machine that was originally running still images using MicroPython, and tested playing GIFs from microSD. As expected, the playback speed is slow, but it’s amazing how much it works on the Raspberry Pi Pico.

If you prioritize speed, you have no choice but to save GIFs in memory, so you have no choice but to use the larger capacity Feather RP2040 or WeAct RP2040, and to be honest, loading the microSD is a chore (this happens every time). For some reason I couldn’t read the 32GB card, but was able to read the really old 64MB card.

See the thread here.

Examining The Mythology of Masculinity

Nat Meade explores the meaning of masculinity through his paintings. via Artsy

So far, Meade has mostly worked small, and his intensely colorful, dense compositions have earned him spots in notable private and public collections. “Hank Stamper’s Bones,” Meade’s second solo show at Hesse Flatow in New York, on view through October 14th, presents works from this year that all expand his exploration of masculine archetype. The title references the eldest son of the hardscrabble, Pacific Northwestern logging family from Ken Kesey’s 1964 novel Sometimes a Great Notion. The show also enlivens Meade’s narratives with new adventures, featuring, for the first time, canvases populated by numerous figures, their steeds, and the detailed landscapes they traverse.

Read more.

The Lines of History Depicted in a 10,000-Pound Glass Sculpture #ArtTuesday

The Liberty Science Center has a program called Big Art. It’s been going on for 30 years, and for its 30th anniversary the sculptor Dustin Yellin stepped up in excellent form. He created a piece called The Politics of Eternity it’s 10,000 pounds and explores historical time over seven columns. Here’s more from COLOSSAL:

He spent around 20,000 hours—that’s about 834 days!—painstakingly composing tiny details between sheets of laminated glass. One section portrays a fictive community gathered around an ancient totem, followed by a society of the future in which its denizens don jet packs within a “techno-metropolis” that rises up around a rocket ship. From each of these areas, waterfalls feed into a central world full of tall ships, supertankers, rafts, and drones.

Rather than a linear expression of time, a mashup of technologies, climates, and terrain merge seamlessly into one another. By portraying the past, present, and future simultaneously, Yellin prompts viewers to consider the interconnectivity of all time periods and how our actions in the past and today will continue to influence the future.

See and learn more!

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Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

The Great Search: Generic 24-series I2C EEPROM #TheGreatSearch #DigiKey #Adafruit @DigiKey @Adafruit

(Video) As we are plowing through the last of our chip-shortage-recovery revisions, next up we’re about to do a bunch of Raspberry Pi HAT displays. HATs are 9 years old, and are a standardized way of Attaching Hardware on Top of RPi’s.

Given the RPi shortage is also over, thankfully, it’s time to look at more HATs! One feature that HATs have is an onboard EEPROM that helps identify the board via a set of extra I2C pins – this EEPROM can be used to load device tree fragments, contain MAC addresses, calibration details or other non-secured unique data. We’ve covered 25Q series SPI Flash memory before, and 24-series looks soooo similar but they are not! Let’s look at some options for adding generic 32Kbit / 4 KByte I2C EEPROMs including some things to watch out for so you don’t make mistakes we have.

See the chosen part on DigiKey

See episodes of The Desk of Ladyada in the playlist here and other Great Searches in the playlist here.

Wiki.JS: A Free, Self-Hosted Wiki for Raspberry Pi @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

Want to add a free wiki that can run on your Raspberry Pi? Here’s Wiki.JS. Here’s more from PiMyLifeUp:

Wiki.JS is a powerful, free, and self-hosted wiki that you can run on your Raspberry Pi….

One of the benefits of this particular Wiki clone is that it boasts a considerable number of features and has support for a visual editor, markdown, and more. It even boasts support for 2-factor authentication, allowing you to improve the security of your setup.

See project!

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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

Epson HX-2023 #piday #raspberrypi

The Epson HX-20 was the first “notebook computer” as Byte Magazine put it in 1982 “larger than a pocket computer and smaller than a briefcase computer,”

Don over on Hackaday.io lovingly reimagines the Epson for 2023 as the Epson HX-2023/cyberdeck. Powered with a Pi and a bunch of Adafruit goodies, including a KB2040 – RP2040 Kee Boar Driver.

Thanks for sharing! This is version two what will version 3 bring?!

There’s no 3D printing here. Everything was done by hand using various Dremel tools, ‘Xacto’ knife, and lots of sand paper.

The original keyboard is wired to the KB2040, programmed with KMK. This is then wired to small USB 2.0 2-port hub. One of the original USB 2.0 ports was rewired to provide the signal path to the hub and back without the loss of an additional USB port.

The USB 3.0 port stack was modified to a single port. The 2nd USB 3.0 is rerouted to a custom cable to the SSD.

The GPIO on the Pi has been flipped to connect to 40pin to FPC on the underside to fit. The matching FPC to 40pin was also de-soldered and flipped also to fit.

Even though the computer is from the 1980’s it’s quite compact.

LCD bezel was custom made from expanded PVC plastic board.

The rear and side plates are made from acrylic sheet.

See more!

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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

Can a Raspberry Pi swim? #PiDay @Raspberry_Pi

Rasim Muratovic (aka Rasmurtech) has been submerging a Raspberry Pi in mineral oil.

The thing about mineral oil is that while it looks just like water at a glance, it isn’t electrically conductive. This makes it fun to play with.

The keyboard, power, and Ethernet cables are all plugged into the board, which is also connected to a monitor. When Rasim connected the power cable to a power source, the submerged Raspberry Pi’s LED successfully flashed green and it starting booting, as shown on the monitor. Rasim went on to log in using his keyboard and mouse, and loaded a graphical user interface. Just like you’d do with any ordinary Raspberry Pi that isn’t immersed in a tub of liquid.

See more in the video below and in the article here.

Creating AI art with Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W #PiDay #AI @Raspberry_Pi

Creating AI art using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W shouldn’t work, but a determined software optimiser, Vito Plantamura, found a way.

What we’ve seen little of, to date, is canny AI generators that can run on a computer with modest processing capabilities. Training AI models requires powerful servers and multiple dedicated GPU (graphics processing unit) boards to create the model that can generate images.

fter this training process comes “inference”, where a trained model is used to infer a result on a regular computer. Even this takes time on a powerful computer with multiple GBs of RAM.

OnnxStream, however, makes inference possible on a tiny Raspberry Pi Zero with just 512MB RAM and finds a balance between processing power and generation time to turn out impressive imagery via Stable Diffusion.

See the video below and more via this article and on GitHub.

Running PalmOS on a Raspberry Pi RP2040 #RaspberryPi #RP2040 @dmitrygr @Raspberry_Pi

Dmitry Grinberg had demonstrated a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller running unmodified PalmOS 5.2.8 (showing off world’s only ARM-to-thumb1 just in time (JIT) compiler).

How little RAM/CPU does PalmOS 5 really require? Since rePalm had support (at least in theory) for Cortex-M0, I wanted to try on real hardware, as previously the support was tested on CortexEmu only. There does happen to be one Cortex-M0 chip out there with enough ram – the RP2040 – the chip in the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico. I then sought out a display with a touchscreen that could be easily bought. There were actually not that many options, but this one seemed like a good fit. It turned out, after some investigation, that driving it properly and quickly will not be at all easy. RP2040’s special sauce – the PIO – to the rescue!

Dmitry documents the extensive history and architecture of Palm devices and their operating system, from Motorola 68000 versions to the switch to Arm devices. A masterclass in both Palm and reverse engineering.

See this post for all the details. Via X (formerly Twitter).

A Look Inside the Labor-Intensive Process of Making a Tiffany-Style Lamp #ArtTuesday

Relaxing process video showing how a stain glass lamp is manufactured. They may not be genuine Tiffany but a lot of care and craft goes into them. Video from Process Discovery Picked up by Open Culture:

First, the pieces are cut by hand or using blades mounted on metal arms. Their shapes and number are predetermined by a pattern…again in the style of Tiffany.

You won’t find the speckled confetti glass or golden hued glass with a translucent amber sheen that are defining features of the real McCoy here…

Once the pieces have been cut and sorted, their edges are wrapped in copper foil tape. (In Tiffany’s day this would have involved hand cutting strips of copper, then smearing them with beeswax to help them to adhere to the glass.)

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Make your own beautiful lamp with The Adafruit Learning System:

• BLE Feather Lamp
• Star Fragment IoT Lamp
• LEGO Head Lamp with Audio
• Rainbow Bottle Lamp with Fairy Lights
• LED Sculpture Lamp
• 3d Printed Flower Lamp Shade

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Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

The Unconventional Time/Motion Studies of Mike Mandel #ArtTuesday

In the early 1900s, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth performed studies to analyze and refine workers’ movements. To record visual data on movement, they captures movements in a still image they called the chronocyclegraph by attaching pulsing lights to the workers’ hands and making 3-D, time-lapse images. This technique inspired Mike Mandel to use the same technique to create his wonderful artwork. Here’s more from JUXTAPOZ:

[Mike Mandel] discovered the stereographic imagery of efficiency studies created by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and he began to photograph his own time/motion studies of everyday life which resulted in the book Making Good Time, self-published in 1989. In the early years of the 20th century, the Gilbreths competed with Frederick Winslow Taylor in the new field of Scientific Management to study the work methods of laborers in the newly created factories to save time and increase production for their clients. Later, Frank and Lillian and their twelve children became America’s favorite family after a series of books were published about their efficiency-conscious household in the 1950s. The movie, Cheaper By the Dozen, 1950, celebrated their obsessive efficiency as a situation comedy, but few people are familiar with the Gilbreths’ contribution to the history of photography that uniquely changed how workers were managed by their employers. The Gilbreths employed small, strobing lights that they attached to a worker’s wrists to measure the “one best way” to do work. They made time exposures of factory workers, typists, soldiers, and surgeons.

They naïvely believed that their photography would reduce fatigue on the job and that the worker would share in the benefits of increased production. In Making Good Time Mandel responds with his own time/motion studies.

See more!

ICYMI Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Python Top Language, Picos Are Everywhere and much more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython #ICYMI @Raspberry_Pi

If you missed this week’s Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter, here is the ICYMI (in case you missed it) version.

To never miss another issue, subscribe now! – You’ll get one terrific newsletter each Tuesday (which is out before this post). 10,563 subscribers worldwide.

The next newsletter goes out in a week and subscribing is the best way to keep up with all things Python for hardware. No spam, no selling lists, leave any time.

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Welcome to the latest Python on Microcontrollers newsletter! Python popularity seems to have few bounds, and the IEEE concurs. And it seems like the RP2040 processor is becoming a favorite, from hobby work to production floors. It’s a great time to use Python on Hardware! – Anne Barela, Ed.

We’re on Discord, Twitter, and for past newsletters – view them all here. If you’re reading this on the web, subscribe here. Here’s the news this week:

The IEEE Spectrum Top Programming Languages for 2023

In the latest IEEE Spectrum ranking of the top programming languages, Python and Java are on top with Python the leader by a considerable margin – IEEE Spectrum.

“Python has become the jack-of-all-trades language—and the master of some, such as AI, where powerful and extensive libraries make it ubiquitous. And although Moore’s Law is winding down for high-end computing, low-end microcontrollers are still benefiting from performance gains, which means there’s now enough computing power available on a US $0.70 CPU to make Python a contender in embedded development.”

CircuitPython 8.2.6 Released

CircuitPython 8.2.6 is the latest bugfix revision of CircuitPython, and is the new stable release – Adafruit Blog and GitHub Release Page.

Notable changes to 8.2.6 since 8.2.5

• Updated the TLS root certificates to support servers using Let’s Encrypt.

Limor “Ladyada” Fried Interviewed on The Pi Cast

The Tom’s Hardware Pi Cast on September 12th featured Limor “Ladyada” Fried from Adafruit. They discuss “Writing Arduino Drivers With AI” – YouTube.

Writing libraries to support our favorite microcontrollers is a big task, but what if ChatGPT could lend a hand? Adafruit’s own Limor “Ladyada” Fried has tasked ChatGPT to write Arduino drivers in her own style, creating a “mini-Limor” bot to handle the task. We sat down with Fried to talk about how AI can help Adafruit and the wider community to write drivers, and improve workflows.

Unicomp Switches Popular Model M Keyboards to Use Raspberry Pi Pico

For years, enthusiasts have been asking for reprogrammable Model M keyboards from Unicomp. Thanks to the 2022 discontinuation of the Cypress microcontroller Unicomp previously used for its USB keyboards, Unicomp keyboards are now mostly reflashable, thanks to their selection of the RP2040-based Raspberry Pi Pico as the heart of its new generation of USB controller cards, allowing for custom firmware just by copying a new UF2 – Admiral Shark’s Keyboards.

Open Source Hardware Certifications For August 2023

Make is providing written summaries of hardware certifications by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA). Three are highlighted, including the Adafruit Floppy FeatherWing – Makezine.

Pimoroni’s Pi-Powered ‘Pico Vision’ Nears Completion

Squeezing the Raspberry Pi Pico’s RP2040 into another breakout board, UK-based Pimoroni is working on Pico Vision. The board, according to Pimoroni software developer Phil ‘Gadgetoid’ Howard, is “a dual RP2040 ‘CPU’ and ‘GPU’ HDMI stick for … doin’ graphics stuff on big screens.” GPIO access is limited to QW/ST connections and a few GPIO pins broken out via the CPU and GPU debug pins – Tom’s Hardware.

Bus Pirate 5 Teased

Dangerous Prototypes has been demonstrating fresh progress with the Bus Pirate 5, a multiprotocol test device. It’s built using the Raspberry Pi RP2040 – X, formerly Twitter and buspirate.com.

This Week’s Python Streams

Python on Hardware is all about building a cooperative ecosphere which allows contributions to be valued and to grow knowledge. Below are the streams within the last week focusing on the community.

CircuitPython Deep Dive Stream

Last Friday, Scott streamed work on ESP IDF 5.0.

You can see the latest video and past videos on the Adafruit YouTube channel under the Deep Dive playlist – YouTube.

CircuitPython Parsec

John Park’s CircuitPython Parsec this week is on Circuit Playground Tones – Adafruit Blog and YouTube.

Catch all the episodes in the YouTube playlist.

Project of the Week: Tulip CC on the LILYGO T-Deck

The T-Deck is a ESP32-S3 N16R8 based device with touchscreen, a small blackberry-style keyboard, LoRA (optional), speaker, microphone, SD card slot, battery charging IC, and trackball. Developers have been doing some interesting projects with it including a handheld MS-DOS/Windows machine. The folks behind Tulip CC have ported their software to the device. This provides an interactive MicroPython “deck” experience for music, graphics, and games – GitHub.

News from around the web!

CircuitPython FTP Server is a library providing a simple FTP server for Circuitpython 8.x, with PASV and ACTIVE support – GitHub via X.

A revision to the Embedded Systems Engineering Roadmap – X.

Configure your MicroPython project with JSON files. Learn how to get your microcontroller to remember your settings, so you can quickly get it back in working state even if it loses power or reboots – Bhavesh Kakwani.

Trevor Flowers builds replicas and machines from alternate timelines. The current project is a miniature replica of a TRS-80 Model III. Inside it uses an Adafruit display, Adafruit QT Py microcontroller and EYESPI connector breakout, all running CircuitPython – Mastodon.

Turn an Adafruit Trinkey into a QR code scanner with CircuitPython and Useful Sensors’ new Tiny Code Reader module – X.

Max Van Leeuwen turned a gifted Polaroid camera into a Raspberry Pi camera capable of sending digital pictures to his Grandmothers’ picture frame – Raspberry Pi.

Revisiting a 2017 video on making a hexapod, and turned the notes into a similarly dated blog post. The code is from 2017, but the write up is recent. For hexapods with ESP8266, MicroPython and the PCA9685 – X and Orionrobots.

Details + code are now up for Cedar Grove Studio’s “windless” electronic chimes – GitHub.

Raspberry Pi Spectrometer puts the power of light at your fingertips, programmed in Python – hackster.io.

Coding the Waveshare RP2040 Matrix in CircuitPython or MicroPython – The Pi Hut.

The Lilygo9 T-display S3 touch running MicroPython with the touch driver – X.

Transfer Data From Raspberry Pi Pico To Local Computer – Electromaker andf YouTube.

PicoBricks WiFi gamepad projects with MicroPython – GitHub and X.

A Badger 2040 W + mini Keyboard case makes a small console with a Pimoroni Badger 2040 W and a small keyboard – Thingiverse.

Running forth3 on an RP2040 via no-std + async things – Bluesky and asciinema.

It is a 1×2 size Lego block with display (after a bit of trimming)! And it can display bitmaps from MicroPython – Mini OLED Unit 0.42” 72×40 Display with I2C – X and M5Stack.

PyDev of the Week: Jelle Zijlstra on Mouse vs Python.

CircuitPython Weekly Meeting for September 11th: (notes) on YouTube.

#ICYDNCI What was the most popular, most clicked link, in last week’s newsletter? VS Code: Virtual Environments for Embedded Development with Conda.

New

The Waveshare RP2040-PiZero provides a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller in a Pi Zero form factor. It includes a microSD reader and 40 pin header – LinuxGizmos.com.

Orange Pi launches its Zero 2W Single-Board Computer, offering faster clocks and 8x Times the RAM. The board was designed to go toe-to-toe with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. This SBC includes a handy 24-pin expansion header with USB, Ethernet, and more – hackster.io.

Banana Pi BPI-P2 PRO provides PoE and low power consumption with excellent thermal characteristics, making this board an excellent basis for building a smart voice-controlled device, the sound part of a smart robot, smart speaker, or home assistant – X.

New Boards Supported by CircuitPython

The number of supported microcontrollers and Single Board Computers (SBC) grows every week. This section outlines which boards have been included in CircuitPython or added to CircuitPython.org.

This week there were no new boards added but several are in development.

Note: For non-Adafruit boards, please use the support forums of the board manufacturer for assistance, as Adafruit does not have the hardware to assist in troubleshooting.

Looking to add a new board to CircuitPython? It’s highly encouraged! Adafruit has four guides to help you do so:

• How to Add a New Board to CircuitPython
• How to add a New Board to the circuitpython.org website
• Adding a Single Board Computer to PlatformDetect for Blinka
• Adding a Single Board Computer to Blinka

New Learn Guides!

Audio Synthesis with CircuitPython synthio from John Park

Tombstone Prop-Maker RP2040 from Noe and Pedro

Adafruit MatrixPortal S3 from Melissa LeBlanc-Williams

CircuitPython Libraries!

The CircuitPython library numbers are continually increasing, while existing ones continue to be updated. Here we provide library numbers and updates!

To get the latest Adafruit libraries, download the Adafruit CircuitPython Library Bundle. To get the latest community contributed libraries, download the CircuitPython Community Bundle.

If you’d like to contribute to the CircuitPython project on the Python side of things, the libraries are a great place to start. Check out the CircuitPython.org Contributing page. If you’re interested in reviewing, check out Open Pull Requests. If you’d like to contribute code or documentation, check out Open Issues. We have a guide on contributing to CircuitPython with Git and GitHub, and you can find us in the #help-with-circuitpython and #circuitpython-dev channels on the Adafruit Discord.

You can check out this list of all the Adafruit CircuitPython libraries and drivers available.

The current number of CircuitPython libraries is 449!

New Libraries!

Here’s this week’s new CircuitPython libraries:

• adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_JSON_Stream

Updated Libraries!

Here’s this week’s updated CircuitPython libraries:

• adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_BME680
• adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_HTTPServer

Library PyPI Weekly Download Stats

Total Library Stats

• 73763 PyPI downloads over 313 libraries

Top 10 Libraries by PyPI Downloads

• Adafruit CircuitPython BusDevice (adafruit-circuitpython-busdevice): 7375
• Adafruit CircuitPython Requests (adafruit-circuitpython-requests): 6442
• Adafruit CircuitPython Register (adafruit-circuitpython-register): 2347
• Adafruit CircuitPython Motor (adafruit-circuitpython-motor): 1570
• Adafruit CircuitPython PCA9685 (adafruit-circuitpython-pca9685): 1522
• Adafruit CircuitPython ServoKit (adafruit-circuitpython-servokit): 1442
• Adafruit CircuitPython NeoPixel (adafruit-circuitpython-neopixel): 1050
• Adafruit CircuitPython ESP32SPI (adafruit-circuitpython-esp32spi): 827
• Adafruit CircuitPython RGB Display (adafruit-circuitpython-rgb-display): 754
• Adafruit CircuitPython DHT (adafruit-circuitpython-dht): 722

What’s the CircuitPython team up to this week?

What is the team up to this week? Let’s check in!

Dan

I released CircuitPython 8.2.6 last Tuesday to add a new root TLS root certificate to the roots certificate we use in the Espressif and Pico W ports. The certificate changes in 8.2.5 updated the list, but did not include a special certificate needed by webservers that use Let’s Encrypt certificates.

After the release, I did some debugging with colleagues of a couple of issues that turned out to be hardware rather than software related. Now I’m back working on the MicroPython v1.20.0 merge.

Kattni

This week I worked on the Metro M7 with microSD guide. It has everything you need to get started with your fancy new Metro. Check it out in the Adafruit Learn System.

On a personal note, I have some news to share. My last day with Adafruit will be September 22, 2023. I will get into this more next week, but I wanted to include it alongside the rest of the announcements. Thank you for being such an amazing community! You are what drew me to this in the first place, and I am honored to have been a part of this for the last seven years. I will still be a member of the community, but I will be participating in a different capacity.

Melissa

I’ve been working on going through Blinka and related issues on GitHub and either closing the issues if they have been resolved already or creating Pull Requests if the solution is relatively easy. As I go through and more issues are closed, I find it less overwhelming and easier to address the remaining issues. The goal is to get the issues down to the more complex ones that really should have some actions taken at some point.

Tim

This week I worked on validating a recent fix for Read the Docs docs building and creating a patch file that adabot will be able to use to apply this fix to all of the CircuitPython libraries in an automated fashion. I’ve submitted PRs with the patch, as well as the same fix in the cookie cutter. I’ve also been trying options for templating libraries, utemplate is one made for MicroPython and a community member is working on a new one focused more directly for CircuitPython. This can be used along with the HTTPServer library to render HTML web pages with dynamic data populated into them from Python variables.

Jeff

The “dot clock display” pull request has been merged. Thanks for everyone who tested and provided feedback!

Next up is some even less glitzy work to better send display initialization sequences for these kinds of displays, particularly when the display’s SPI bus is connected to a GPIO expander rather than directly to the microcontroller, as it is on the Espressif devkit and Adafruit’s upcoming board.

Scott

This week I’ve been continuing to work on the ESP IDF5 update PR. I’ve slimmed down the builds so they all fit and reworked the board config to make flash and PSRAM settings more explicit. Now, I’m smoke testing on each different chip to ensure that basic Python URL requests still work. S3 is ok but S2 is having memory issues with HTTPS currently. C3 and ESP32 still need to be checked. Once they all work, then I’ll update the PR. There will definitely still be bugs but they’ll be easier to find once it is merged into main. I can also follow up with a 5.1 update after that too.

Liz

This week I worked on updating the 2.8” TFT Touch Shield v2 guide for the new version that just came into the shop. The new version uses the TSC2007 for touch screen functionality. I worked on the guide for the STEMMA QT breakout version of that chip so it was cool to use it in conjunction with a TFT screen. I added a fun CircuitPython example that uses the touch screen to advance a slideshow of Circuit Playground characters.

Upcoming Events!

PyCon UK will be returning to Cardiff City Hall from Friday 22nd September to Monday 25th September 2023 – PyCon UK.

The next MicroPython Meetup in Melbourne will be on September 27th – Meetup.

Maker Faire Bay Area will be October 13-15 & October 20-22, 2023 – Eventbright.

Hackaday has announced that the Hackaday Supercon is on for 2023, and will be taking place November 3 – 5 in Pasadena, California, USA – Adafruit Blog and Hackaday.

The inaugural PyLadies Conference will take place December 1-3, 2023 – pretalx.

The Pyjamas Conference, the 24-hour online Python conference, will be returning for a fifth year on December 9-10. The Call for Papers began on September 2nd and extends to September 30th – Twitter.

Send Your Events In

If you know of virtual events or upcoming events, please let us know via email to cpnews(at)adafruit(dot)com.

Latest Releases

CircuitPython’s stable release is 8.2.6. New to CircuitPython? Start with our Welcome to CircuitPython Guide.

20230912 is the latest Adafruit CircuitPython library bundle.

20230906 is the latest CircuitPython Community library bundle.

v1.20.0 is the latest MicroPython release. Documentation for it is here.

3.11.5 is the latest Python release. The latest pre-release version is 3.12.0rc2.

3,658 Stars Like CircuitPython? Star it on GitHub!

Call for Help – Translating CircuitPython is now easier than ever!

One important feature of CircuitPython is translated control and error messages. With the help of fellow open source project Weblate, we’re making it even easier to add or improve translations.

Sign in with an existing account such as GitHub, Google or Facebook and start contributing through a simple web interface. No forks or pull requests needed! As always, if you run into trouble join us on Discord, we’re here to help.

37,847 Thanks!

The Adafruit Discord community, where we do all our CircuitPython development in the open, reached over 37,847 humans – thank you! Adafruit believes Discord offers a unique way for Python on hardware folks to connect. Join today at https://adafru.it/discord.

ICYMI – In case you missed it

Python on hardware is the Adafruit Python video-newsletter-podcast! The news comes from the Python community, Discord, Adafruit communities and more and is broadcast on ASK an ENGINEER Wednesdays. The complete Python on Hardware weekly videocast playlist is here. The video podcast is on iTunes, YouTube, Instagram Reels), and XML.

The weekly community chat on Adafruit Discord server CircuitPython channel – Audio / Podcast edition – Audio from the Discord chat space for CircuitPython, meetings are usually Mondays at 2pm ET, this is the audio version on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and XML feed.

Contribute!

The CircuitPython Weekly Newsletter is a CircuitPython community-run newsletter emailed every Tuesday. The complete archives are here. It highlights the latest CircuitPython related news from around the web including Python and MicroPython developments. To contribute, edit next week’s draft on GitHub and submit a pull request with the changes. You may also tag your information on Twitter with #CircuitPython.

Join the Adafruit Discord or post to the forum if you have questions.