Python snakes its way to eInk displays!
We’re working on these lovely eInk breakouts which come in multiple sizes. They have an SRAM buffer, so you don’t have to have lots of free memory to use them. We like the red/black/white tri-color displays for that vivid red highlighting! They look great even in bright daylight – Video & here’s the JSON of the quotes from Adafruit to play around with too.
Biggest board to support CircuitPython is shipping!
It’s here! The Grand Central. To start off our ATSAMD51 journey, we are going large with the Mega shape and pinout you know and love. The left half has the same shape and pinout as our Metro 328/M0, so it is compatible with all our shields.
It’s got analog pins where you expect and SPI/UART/I2C hardware support in the same spot as the Metro 328 and M0.
It’s powered with an ATSAMD51P20: a Cortex M4 core running at 120 MHz, hardware DSP and floating point support, 1MB flash, 256 KB RAM, 32-bit, 3.3V logic and power, 70 GPIO pins in total, dual 1 MSPS DAC (A0 and A1), dual 1 MSPS ADC (15 analog pins), 8 x hardware SERCOM (can be I2C, SPI or UART), 22 x PWM outputs, Stereo I2S input/output with MCK pin, 12-bit Parallel capture controller (for camera/video in), built in crypto engines with AES (256 bit), true RNG, and Pubkey controller – Adafruit.
Modern Turtle Graphics, the descendants of LOGO in Python
Some of the most popular Adafruit blog posts last year, including the #1 post, revolved around LOGO, the original “turtle” graphics developed in the 1960’s for learning which was shipped on nearly all classic computing platforms since.
The popularity is due to the simplicity – if you can learn an etch-a-sketch, you can learn turtle graphics. Once you learn, then you can do things that etch-a-sketch only dreams of, more like spirograph!
Python is the fastest growing computer language today, with school and hobbyist adoptions growing year over year.
Can Python do turtle graphics ala LOGO? Yes it can! Here are some ways you can do turtle graphics in a Python environment – Adafruit.
News from around the web!
This project intends to provide a tool that makes it easier to configure your Adafruit NeoTrellis M4 for use as a launchpad device. It is implemented as an HTML5 web application that you can run locally, or host on a server. The application provides a nice, easy to use GUI for editing the configuration of the launchpad – GitHub.
CircuitPython on Reddit is now over 100+ subscribers! Join today – Reddit.
With the next generation of @edu_blocks you’ll be able to create Python programs on PC, Mac, iOS and Android – Twitter.
Play the Star Spangled Banner using Circuit Python – GitHub.
Campfire made with CircuitPython from the upcoming “Big Book of Maker Camp Projects” – Twitter.
Using Visual Studio Code to program CircuitPython with an Adafruit NeoTrellis M4 via Scott Hanselman.
DIY Gamepad made with CircuitPython – GitHub.
LED light drawing using CircuitPython on the NeoTrellis M4 – Instagram.
Using MicroPython on Seeed Wio Link – hackster.io
Advanced Jupyter Notebooks: A Tutorial – dataquest.io
Python 3 Trinkets – Web based, and more, ways to run Python in a browser – trinket.io
State of Python in 2018, by Daniel Kats – Medium.
Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership – abopen.com via Twitter.
Tesla Autopilot HW3 details with some interesting details on System on a Chip and Neural Networks – Reddit.
#ICYDNCI What was the most popular, most clicked link, in last week’s newsletter? 35C3 – MicroPython – Python for Microcontrollers.
PyDev of the Week: Kushal Das from Mouse vs Python
CircuitPython Weekly for January 7th, 2019 on YouTube diode.zone
CircuitPython in 2019
As 2018 comes to a close we like to reflect on how the year went and set goals for 2019. In the last two years (2017, 2018) this has been a blog post by Scott (aka tannewt). For 2019, we’d like to do it a bit differently. This time we’d like everyone in the CircuitPython community to contribute by posting their thoughts to some public place on the Internet.
We’ll read these over the holidays and into the first half of January. After the January 14th CircuitPython weekly we’ll draft an overarching vision post for CircuitPython in 2019 and discuss it in the following meeting.
See the blog post for more details.
Here are a few responses so far!
Coming soon
GPIO Bonnet, will work with CircuitPython on Raspberry Pi.
New Learn Guides!
Updated Learn Guides!
CircuitPython on the nRF52 from Ladyada
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!
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 124!
New Libraries!
Keep checking back for new CircuitPython libraries!
Updated Libraries!
Here are this week’s updated CircuitPython libraries:
Upcoming events!
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-alpha.5. New to CircuitPython? Start with our Welcome to CircuitPython Guide.
20190107 is the latest CircuitPython library bundle.
v1.9.4 is the latest MicroPython release. Documentation for it is here.
3.7.2 is the latest Python release.
744 Stars Like CircuitPython? Star it on GitHub!
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.
9,880 thanks!
The Adafruit Discord community where we do all our CircuitPython development in the open reached over 9,880 humans, thank you! Join today! https://adafru.it/discord
ICYMI – In case you missed it
The wonderful world of Python on hardware! This is our first video-newsletter-podcast that we’re trying out! The news comes from the Python community, discord, Adafruit communities and more. It’s part of the weekly newsletter here, 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.
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. Join our Discord or post to the forum for any further questions.
