Women in Open Source award, please vote!

Our Ladyada (Limor Fried) was nominated for Red Hat’s Women in Open Source Award! CircuitPython is open-source hardware, and software, and always will be! Please vote for her! Visit – https://www.redhat.com/en/about/women-in-open-source

Python is for the birds

Laen (owner of OSHPark) made a prototype of an electronic bird toy. To play music, load it up with .WAV files, and when the bird touches a screw, it’ll play them – Twitter & photos.

CircuitPython deep dive – Debugging memory issues

Live stream of Scott debugging memory issues in CircuitPython. Safe mode is handy – YouTube.

EduBlocks, Python, and more…

Are you familiar with block-based programming and trying to make the jump to Python?

You’re in luck! EduBlocks is a web-based programming interface that is making the transition from block-based programming languages like Scratch to the syntax-based language Python easier.

In this guide, we will go through the EduBlocks editor interface and different code blocks – learn.adafruit.com

BLE Light switch with Feather nRF52840 and Crickit using CircuitPython

Build your own Bluetooth, remote-controlled robotic light switch to turn on and off the lights! Using CircuitPython running on the Feather nRF52840 Express and Crickit FeatherWing to flip the switch with a servo motor, you can avoid all of the complexities and dangers of high voltage mains wiring!

The 3D printed actuator, mount, and case makes it reliable and tidy. And the Adafruit Bluefruit app running on your iOS or Android device makes it fun and easy! – learn.adafruit.com

Pick up some CircuitPython at the new Raspberry Pi store!

The new Raspberry Pi store at the Grand Arcade, in Cambridge, UK is stocking Adafruit, including CircuitPython boards! Video & more.

First look – Pyboard-D from MicroPython

Pyboard-D from MicroPython, photos and more (French) – MCHOBBY.

Python snakes its way to Method Magazine

Methods eZine: Design Trends & the Transformation of Everything features Python on hardware this month, including an interview with Ladyada, page 35. Take a glimpse inside 5G, get an engineer’s perspective on AI, follow the twists and turns of autonomous vehicles’ road to level-5 development and more. Gain key insights from thought leaders, including Ladyada, Bob Martin, Jason Shepherd and others – PDF.

Making games with Python on hardware at FOSDEM and more…

FOSDEM is a two-day event organised by volunteers to promote the widespread use of free and open source software. A lot of the slides and videos from FOSDEM were posted, here are some of the ones we’ve been enjoying. Pictured above, Computer Games with MicroPython, Become a full-stack game developer by Radomir Dopieralski. CAD and Open Hardware devroom, full listing. Fritzing – the past, the present and the future, paving the way for Fritzing’s development. From the idea to the prototype using FLOSS.

News from around the web!

Sophy’s CircuitPython powered space suit – Twitter.

Tron Identity Disc prop – Using Feather, Neopixels, and made with CircuitPython – Twitter.

Melissa hacking a RC remote to transmit from the receiver, which is read by the new Adafruit Grand Central board, and send control data to the servos. This is all done using CircuitPython – Twitter. The goal is to make the ultimate programmable RC car. Imagine being able to turn on or off headlights by remote or having an accelerometer to detect G-forces and having brake lights glow when slowing or even control combos for programmed tricks.

No point IR camera by Szaja, made with CircuitPython – hackaday.io

HiFi Preamplifier – An open source, high end, high fidelity preamplifier, made with CircuitPython – hackster.io

Maker Update: Clocking In [Maker Update Newsletter #111] Adafruit edition – Video. This will come out once a month and feature a buncha’ Python on hardware!

Lord of the Ring Lights, a CircuitPython powered LED light ring by SparkFun.

Caitlinsdad has a delightful CircuitPython themed gift pack to make and give this Valentine’s Day – Twitter.

Groguard got the Adafruit Ethernet FeatherWing working with the in-development Giant Board – Twitter.

Kathy posted up photos from the Albany Medical College STEP program presenting the Programmable Pals the young folks made with Circuit Playground Express and showing them how to code – Twitter.

debrouxl is hacking up a third-party DPFP-based version of CircuitPython for the Trinket M0 compatible TI-Python Adapter – GitHub.

The latest version of Adafruit IO Python (2.1) includes updated API and MQTT clients for using Adafruit IO’s random data and weather services – adafruit.io

Adafruit spotted on MythBusters Jr – Twitter.

Fusion 360 design files for various Adafruit boards, components and parts – GitHub. And some 3D models from Adafruit of various components for making boards – GitHub.

Curated list of awesome Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for electrical engineering – Reddit.

A curated list of awesome Feather boards, add-ons (FeatherWings), guides, videos, software and resources – GitHub.

Python and C hybrid programming on a microcontroller with Zerynth.

Some photos of the MicroPython booth at FOSDEM19 – Twitter.

MicroPython with ESP32 and ESP8266: Interacting with GPIOs – randomnerdtutorials.com

Pavol Rusnak, 2017 – MicroPython & TREZOR – YouTube.

Snek-Duino: Snek with Arduino I/O, mini Python-like language renamed from ‘Newt’ to ‘Snek’. Same language, new name – keithhp.com

Adding custom fonts to E-Paper displays – apusta.cc. font2bytes – a multiplatform C++ library with a CLI tool and Qt-based GUI app – GitHub & FontToBytes – a MacOS app that was an inspiration.

5 Awesome Books for Learning Python – Zero Equals False.

Computer Vision and Projection Mapping in Python – SparkFun.

Building a Jar of Memories IoT Button with Python, Twilio & AWS. How to send favorite photo memories via text with a click of a far-away button by John Mannelly.

Micro:bit MicroPython: creating a file in the filesystem – techtutorialsx.

The Rise of Python for Embedded Systems Continues – Zerynth.

How To Make Python Wait by Miguel Grinberg.

Results of the Python Developers Survey 2018 have been posted. In the fall of 2018, over twenty-thousand developers from more than 150 different countries participated to help map out an accurate landscape of the Python community.

Meet the tool that automatically infers security vulnerabilities in Python code – deepcode.

New for Code by Zapier: Now Supporting Python 3.7 – Zapier.

Developer preview of Python 3.8 – python.org

PyTesseract: Simple Python Optical Character Recognition – stack abuse.

Awesome Functional Python – GitHub.

QatalystGoss is introducing kids to computational thinking with Python. Coding program gives low-income students the skills, confidence, and knowledge to break free from economic and societal disadvantages – opensource.com

A collective list of free APIs for use in software and web development – GitHub.

This repository contains the code library accompanying Modern Robotics: Mechanics, Planning, and Control (Kevin Lynch and Frank Park, Cambridge University Press 2017) – GitHub & PDF.

A terminal based graphical activity monitor inspired by gtop and vtop – GitHub.

Cheat Sheets for AI, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Deep Learning & Big Data. The Most Complete List of Best AI Cheat Sheets by Stefan Kojouharov.

Previous, a NeXT emulator – http://previous.alternative-system.com.

ORCA Sequencer intro – GitHub & video.

GuiLite is a small UI framework for multiple platforms in 5K lines of code – GitHub & video.

Inter is a typeface specially designed for user interfaces with focus on high legibility of small-to-medium sized text on computer screens – GitHub.

CircuitPython weekly meeting for February 4th, 2019 on YouTube

#ICYDNCI What was the most popular, most clicked link in last week’s newsletter? awesome-circuitpython.

Made with Mu

Tim asks “With a new release of Mu upcoming, I’d like to understand what challenges face teachers (or others) in respect of installing it at all, especially on Windows.

What could we do to smooth the path in respect of security policies, sysadmins, or just the mechanics of installing?” – Twitter.

And, March 11th, London, UK. Meet, learn and share ideas about MicroPython. Nicholas Tollervey will be telling us about the latest features of Mu – a free code editor for Python, MicroPython and CircuitPython devices – Meetup.

Coming soon

CircuitPython with an old IBM Model M – Twitter.

Here’s our version of a secondary “Mu” display – video.

A tiny Bluetooth keyboard doing the same thing – video.

Terminal head, terminal head, does is it get a terminal, terminal is in its head – video.

Quotes, IoT device we’re workin’ on, it gets JSON and displays it, all in Python, takes 5 mins to code up – video.

E-Ink FeatherWing – video.

New Learn Guides!

Lucky Cat with Circuit Playground Express from Mike Barela

Analog Devices ADT7410 Breakout from Brent Rubell

BLE Light Switch with Feather nRF52840 and Crickit from John Park

Updated Guides – Now With More Python!

You can use CircuitPython libraries on Raspberry Pi! We’re updating all of our CircuitPython guides to show how to wire up sensors to your Raspberry Pi, and load the necessary CircuitPython libraries to get going using them with Python. We’ll be including the updates here so you can easily keep track of which sensors are ready to go. Check it out!

Analog Devices ADT7410 Breakout

CircuitPython Libraries!

CircuitPython support for hardware continues to grow. We are adding support for new sensors and breakouts all the time, as well as improving on the drivers we already have. As we add more libraries and update current ones, you can keep up with all the changes right here!

For the latest drivers, download the Adafruit CircuitPython Library Bundle.

If you’d like to contribute, CircuitPython libraries are a great place to start. Have an idea for a new driver? File an issue on CircuitPython! Interested in helping with current libraries? Check out this GitHub issue on CircuitPython for an overview of the State of the CircuitPython Libraries, updated each week. We’ve included open issues from the library issue lists, and details about repo-level issues that need to be addressed. We have a guide on contributing to CircuitPython with Git and Github if you need help getting started. You can also find us in the #circuitpython channel on the Adafruit Discord. Feel free to contact Kattni (@kattni) with any questions.

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

The current number of CircuitPython libraries is 131!

Updated Libraries!

Here’s this week’s updated CircuitPython libraries:

• Adafruit CircuitPython MotorKit
• Adafruit CircuitPython TinyLoRa
• Adafruit CircuitPython BluefruitConnect
• Adafruit CircuitPython BLE
• Adafruit CircuitPython CharLCD
• Adafruit CircuitPython framebuf
• Adafruit CircuitPython FeatherWing
• Adafruit CircuitPython MAX7219
• Adafruit CircuitPython TrellisM4
• Adafruit CircuitPython ADS1x15
• Adafruit CircuitPython TSL2561
• Adafruit CircuitPython HT16K33
• Adafruit CircuitPython Register

PyPI Download Stats!

We’ve written a special library called Adafruit Blinka that makes it possible to use CircuitPython Libraries on Raspberry Pi and other compatible single-board computers. Adafruit Blinka and all the CircuitPython libraries have been deployed to PyPI for super simple installation on Linux! Here are the top 10 CircuitPython libraries downloaded from PyPI in the last week, including the total downloads for those libraries:

Upcoming events!

February 19th, New York, NY. 5th FW meetup: CircuitPython. Brent Rubell of Adafruit will introduce us to CircuitPython with demo and workshop on some cool hardware – Meetup.

February 23rd, Pawtucket, RI. Intro to Python: Adafruit CircuitPython & Circuit Playground Express by Ocean State Maker Mill – eventbrite.

PyCascades 2019! February 23 — 24, 2019, Seattle. WA. PyCascades is a two-day Python conference that will be held in the scenic coastal city of Seattle, Washington (USA).

Nina Zakharenko will be doing a talk “Light Up Your Life – With Python and LEDs!” which includes CircuitPython!

Organized by members of the Python communities in Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland, they aim to bring together Python users and developers from both the Pacific Northwest and around the world – 2019.pycascades.com Tickets are on sale now!

March 11th, London, UK. Meet, learn and share ideas about MicroPython. Nicholas Tollervey will be telling us about the latest features of Mu – a free code editor for Python, MicroPython and CircuitPython devices – Meetup.

May 2019 Cleveland, Ohio! The PyCon 2019 conference, which will take place in Cleveland, is the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language. It is produced and underwritten by the Python Software Foundation, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing and promoting Python. Through PyCon, the PSF advances its mission of growing the international community of Python programmers – PyCon.

Latest releases

CircuitPython’s stable release is 3.1.2 and its unstable release is 4.0.0-beta.2. New to CircuitPython? Start with our Welcome to CircuitPython Guide.

20190211 is the latest CircuitPython library bundle.

v1.10 is the latest MicroPython release. Documentation for it is here.

3.7.2 is the latest Python release.

1,020 Stars Like CircuitPython? Star it on GitHub!. Thank you madbodger on Discord for the 1,000th star!

Call for help – CircuitPython messaging to other languages!

We recently posted on the Adafruit blog about bringing CircuitPython messaging to other languages, one of the exciting features of CircuitPython 4.x is translated control and error messages. Native language messages will help non-native English speakers understand what is happening in CircuitPython even though the Python keywords and APIs will still be in English. If you would like to help, please post to the main issue on GitHub and join us on Discord.

We made this graphic with translated text, we could use your help with that to make sure we got the text right, please check out the text in the image – if there is anything we did not get correct, please let us know. Dan sent me this handy site too.

10,506 thanks!

The Adafruit Discord community, where we do all our CircuitPython development in the open, reached over 10,506 humans, thank you! Join today! https://adafru.it/discord

ICYMI – In case you missed it

The wonderful world of Python on hardware! This is Adafruit’s video-newsletter-podcast that we’ve started! The news comes from the Python community, Discord, Adafruit communities and more. It’s part of the weekly newsletter, then we have a segment on ASK an ENGINEER and this is the video slice from that! The complete Python on hardware weekly VideoCast playlist is here.

This video podcast is on iTunes, YouTube, IGTV (Instagram TV), and XML.

New! 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!

Thank you Carlos for the kind words!

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. Join our Discord or post to the forum for any further questions.