Made With Mu – A new blog for a great Python editor
Is it possible to have a favorite new blog the day it launched, YES. A blog to celebrate projects that use the Mu Python code editor to create cool stuff launched this week.
Welcome to Made With Mu, a blog to celebrate the projects and achievements of users of the Mu Python code editor. Mu is a Python editor for beginner programmers based on extensive feedback given by teachers and learners. The project’s main website can be found at codewith.mu.
If you have a project you’d like celebrated, use the form on the submit page (also linked from the site’s header) to tell them about it.
The blog is by Nicholas H. Tollervey, @ntoll on Twitter.
They are looking for submissions from anybody, no matter your skill level, project type or background. If you’re thinking, “they probably don’t mean me” they definitely mean you. Submit your project here.
They are friendly and, if needed, will help make sure your project is presented in the best possible way.
Mu is our favorite editor, Adafruit have contributed code, bug fixes and suggestions for new features. Also, if you use the plotter, you’re using code that originated from us.
News from around the web
Making socks with Python – The Sock Club Magical Color Machine and video.
How to connect a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor to an ESP32 running MicroPython. The sensor data is transmitted wirelessly to a Raspberry Pi using MQTT protocol and the results are displayed on I2C OLED display & video.
Microcontroller hacking with EduBlocks. The ESP32 edition can now drive NeoPixels, all completely wirelessly – Twitter.
JupyterHub 0.9 released. JupyterHub is the multi-user server for Jupyter notebooks, allowing students or researchers to have their own workspace. This release has lots of improvements, especially for stability and performance with large numbers of users.
Getting Started With the Adafruit Circuit Playground Express featuring CircuitPython
Congrats to Mike who works with us here at Adafruit! As a special addition to the current Humble Bundle on Make Programming Books, two new books have been added as of 2 PM Eastern US time on Monday June 25th, 2018. One has been in development for 7 months and is near & dear to the Adafruit family.
Make: Getting Started with Circuit Playground Express is written by Mike Barela, author of GSW Adafruit Trinket (also in the bundle). Mike is an engineer & Maker and recently joined the Adafruit team.
Getting Started is about the single board computers that can be programmed in Python, Arduino C, or in the MakeCode visual language.
This is one of the first books to feature CircuitPython! After the Humble Bundle, this book will be going back into the vault until arriving at the printing press later this year.
In this special early release ebook you’ll discover the most powerful low-cost creative development platform available! From Adafruit Industries (that’s us!), a leader in products to Makers, designers, students young and old, comes the Circuit Playground Express. Connect it to your PC/Mac/Linux device, and you can be programming interactive projects in minutes. You have a choice of programming environments to choose from: Python, the Microsoft MakeCode graphical building block environment, C/C++ via the Arduino development environment and JavaScript.
Pay what you want for the bundle Mike’s book is at the $8 level, and you get all books at the $1 level with that.
Getting Started with the micro:bit is also in there at the $15 tier. All the info and more here.
Make has 5-ish page preview PDF here.
Creative Robotics, with CircuitPython, and more – Hackday Hackchat recap
The Creative Robotics chat with Ladyada on Hackaday was last week, thank you everyone who came by. Ladyada discussed CRICKIT, our Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. CRICKIT is an add-on to Adafruit’s Circuit Playground that lets you Make a Robot using CircuitPython, MakeCode, Arduino, etc.. robotics, arts, crafts, audio animatronics, sensors, agriculture/robot farming, physical computing, kinetic sculptures, science experiments, telescope control… If you missed it, that is OK! Video and transcript. Pictured above are Sophi and Benchoff bots that we made with CircuitPython. We talked for over an hour via text in the hackchat and on video, and went over a lot of the benefits of using Python for hardware, specifically electronics.
HOW IT’S MADE: Programming CRICKIT for selective soldering
Selective soldering is often thought of as a “dark art”. In these two posts – Part I & Part II, series of posts, we pulled back the veil and reveal the interior nature of this process as a whole, with an emphasis on the strategy behind the programming of our new CRICKIT. CRICKIT was made to be the easiest way to code in Python to make robots. And speaking of CRICKIT, Hackspace magazine, latest issue, has a review!
New Learning guides!
Rotary Encoder in CircuitPython from Kattni
Upcoming events!
The International Society for Technology in Education ISTE event is going on now in in Chicago at McCormick Place on June 24–27, 2018. The micro:bit folks are there, here is an overview.
July 23rd to July 29th, 2018 is EuroPython, a community conference with a call for proposals until May 20th on every aspect of Python: programming from novice to advanced levels, applications and frameworks, or how you have been involved in introducing Python into your organization.
August 24-28, 2018 is PyCon.AU in Sydney, Australia. It is the national Python conference for Australia and the home PyCon of MicroPython! Videos of past talks are here.
Latest releases
CircuitPython’s stable release is 2.3.1 and its unstable release is 3.0.0-rc.0. New to CircuitPython? Start with our Welcome to CircuitPython Guide.
20180621 is the latest CircuitPython library bundle.
v1.9.4 is the latest MicroPython release. Documentation for it is here.
3.6.5 is the latest Python release. The latest pre-release version is 3.7.0rc1.
Contribute!
The CircuitPython Weekly Newsletter is a CircuitPython community-run newsletter emailed every Tuesday. 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. Join our Discord or post to the forum for any further questions.
