I scream, you scream, we all scream for Python
When Edvard Munch painted his most famous painting, The Scream, in 1893 he perfectly captured the existential angst of modern humanity. He did not, however, have access to a microcontroller board with built-in sound sensing, connected to a servo motor and speaker, so he failed to make his masterpiece interactive.
Using the Crickit with Circuit Playground Express, and a bit of code in CircuitPython, we can make The Scream scream back at you when you scream at it! – learn.adafruit.com & video.
News from around the web!
This is follow up from a previous newsletter item, the code is up. e-Paper Display driver code for Circuitpython with a fractal demo, it draws a Julia or Mandlebrot fractal on the display. This code was written and tested on an Adafruit Metro M4 running Circuitpython 3.0. The e-Paper displays are the monochrome SPI varieties from Waveshare. Six digital I/O pins are required – GitHub.
The EuroPython Conference videos from last week have been posted – YouTube.
Post Mu 1.0.0 release, Hacker News picked it up and the lead developer ntoll answered some questions in the comments, if you’re interested on how some of Mu works, motivations, and more, check it out – Hacker News. Looks like a tag line for Mu has arrived from the comments – “Python is a language that helps make code readable, Mu is an editor to help make code writable.”
Speaking of Mu (and EuroPython!) Mu was used in the opening conference keynote by Pythonista-extraordinaire David Beazley. Here’s why – “From a more practical point of view, I choose to use Mu for my talk precisely because it was extremely simple. I do a lot of live-coding in talks and for that, I usually try to keep the environment minimal. […] Part of the appeal of Mu is that I could code and use the REPL without cluttering the screen with any other unnecessary cruft. For example, I could use it without having to switch between terminal windows and I could show code and its output at the same time in a fairly easy way.” – MadeWith.mu & video.
Adafruit CircuitPython Weekly – July 30th, 2018
New Learn Guides!
Make It Sound from Mike Barela
Infrared Receive and Transmit with Circuit Playground Express from Kattni
Make It Plot from Mike Barela
Make It Sense from Mike Barela
Circuit Playground Express Treasure Hunt from Carter Nelson
Android GBoard Morse Code Control with Circuit Playground Express from Dave Astels
Upcoming events!
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.
The draft programme for PyCon UK 2018 is up. September 15-19, 2018.
Latest releases
CircuitPython’s stable release is 3.0.0. New to CircuitPython? Start with our Welcome to CircuitPython Guide.
20180724 is the latest CircuitPython library bundle.
v1.9.4 is the latest MicroPython release. Documentation for it is here.
3.7.0 is the latest Python release.
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.
