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SOME END OF YEAR STATS!
In early 2019, we posted up our CircuitPython 2019 post, and soon we’ll have a CircuitPython 2020 post which will have a recap of what we’ve done together as a community and where we might be going. We’ll include a few stats in the 2020 post, and we wanted to have a post with a BUNCH of stats as well – here we go!
CODE
COMMUNITY
- Humans who joined the Adafruit Discord server, over 15,618.
- Posts on Instagram with #circuitpython, over 1,413.
- Average monthly views on Instagram IGTV for the Adafruit Python on hardware weekly video, over 3,800.
- Community meetings (video/podcast, etc), over 116.
- Forum posts in forums.adafruit.com, over 6,972.
- Community members on CircuitPython Reddit, over 700.
HARDWARE
GUIDES
VIDEOS
NEWSLETTERS
ARTICLES AND MORE
A HAH! A CLUE!
Coming soon, our latest CircuitPython powered board, CLUE! Here’s a bit more, and the TOP SECRET video – YouTube:
“We wanted to build some projects that have a small screen and a lot of sensors. This board has a 1.3″ 240×240 IPS TFT display, two buttons, and a ton of sensors: LSM series 9 DOF motion, APDS9960 light/color/proximity, PDM microphone, humidity, temperature and barometric environmental sensing. There’s a QWIIC/STEMMA QT connector for adding more sensors like PM2.5 air quality and others that were too big to fit on the board. We’ll be primarily using CircuitPython for programming it, but it will also work in Arduino. And of course, we’d love to see MakeCode on it! After designing it, the board was close enough to micro:bit-shape-size that we moved a few parts to make it fit in micro:bit robots and some projects – the nRF52840 chip is a big upgrade and it can do stuff like Tensorflow lite for microcontrollers, BLE central and peripheral, and more.”
Hackster.io has some coverage as well.
Program in Python with LEGO EV3
Follow up, looks like this is now live – Python for EV3:
“You can now use your EV3 Brick to unleash the power of Python programming using MicroPython. Simply install the EV3 MicroPython image onto any micro SD card and boot up your EV3 Brick from it to start programming straight away. Switching back to the standard LEGO® MINDSTORMS® EV3 firmware is just as simple. We have also provided full documentation and sample API code to get you started.”
Read more.
Previous:
Tested in 2019: Jeremy’s Favorite Things!
Watch it starting at 3 mins, 15 secs in. Circuit Playground with CircuitPython featured! – YouTube.
CircuitPython Libraries and Jupyter Notebook
Interact with sensors in real-time with Interactive Jupyter Notebooks and CircuitPython Libraries on any computer with an MCP2221 – learn.adafruit.com
CircuitPython, a game changer for rapid development
CircuitPython, a game changer for rapid development – Twitter.
Mobile made easy with CircuitPython
Mobile embedded development with iOS made easy with CircuitPython – Twitter.
700 Thanks!
CircuitPython on Reddit is really taking off! Thank you to the 700+ subscribers on reddit.com/r/circuitpython!
New on CircuitPython.org
We now display the number of boards on circuitpython.org/downloads! There are 94!
News from around the web!
Circuit Playground Bluefruit ornament … Make it so, make it so, make it soooo! – Twitter.
Stury needed lighting for their daughter’s new dollhouse, so they attached an Adafruit Circuit Playground and programmed it to react to the buttons to change the amount of light! – Instagram.
The PewPew M4 Prototype of a CircuitPython game console – Tindie.
36C3 Chaos Communication Congress 2019, all languages, on YouTube.
Talk about Open Source Hardware tonight at Chaos Communication Congress – slides.
Unofficial 36c3 badge made with a Feather M4 Express and CircuitPython – Twitter, and tips to make.
Dave’s Circuit Playground Express, CircuitPython smart-thermostat-in-progress – YouTube and GitHub.
A CircuitPython powered Thermal Camera project – Twitter.
Simple Method for Playing Tunes from CircuitPython, including Jingle Bells and Hanukkah – Wokwi and YouTube.
Building a Standalone GPS Logger with CircuitPython using Adafruit and Particle hardware featured in Episode 161 of PythonBytes.
Feather to mikroBUS adapter board – MIKROE.
Krampus filth globe, like a snow globe, except it’s dirt and fleas, with Circuit Playground Bluefruit, TFT Gizmo & plastic ornament ball. Hanging on a dragon skeleton – Twitter.
Jen Fox made a Circuit Playground dog-boop-able holiday project – Instagram.
Some amazing holiday art from STEAM Tokyo from the CircuitPython Book for Beginners – Twitter.
CircuitPython powered hoodie for 36c3 – Twitter.
At 36c3: Flex, AfterDark and 0.8mm Purple versions of the Blinka PCB designed by Deshipu – Twitter.
Prepare yourself to be honked at during 36c3 with a CircuitPython powered Untitled Goose sound badge – Twitter.
The smallest! Here’s a Fomu Circuitpython RGB LED example – Twitter, and GitHub.
From Jeff! “For a change of pace, I wrote a 1D Wave Simulation to drive a NeoPixel strip with an ever-changing pattern, and made a simple 3D printed bracket to hold it in a spiral shape. Behind the scenes, I also worked on some problems in core CircuitPython that I encountered while developing JEplayer.”
Circuit Playground Bluefruit Express globe – Twitter.
GeekMom’s CircuitPython powered New Year’s Eve dress! – Twitter.
CircuitPython sprite animation of Amie’s bulldog Indy by Kevin – Twitter.
Ikea Tradfri hacking, how to replace the device’s firmware with MicroPython – 36c3.
micropython-IMU: A collection of device drivers and modules for attitude determination and navigation – GitHub.
DumbDumb: A little smart hardware terminal for use with REPLs like MicroPython in the form of a FeatherWing – hackaday.io
Get Started with MicroPython for ESP8266 Microcontrollers – null-byte.
Business Card Runs Linux and MicroPython! – George Hilliard.
Gameslab project overview – Craig.
NeoPixel saber, holiday edition – Instagram.
PicoPew is streaming video over websockets – Twitter.
Retrospective of Python compilation efforts – GitHub.
Building a 6800 CPU on an FPGA with nMigen – YouTube and GitHub.
piwheels.org has now saved over 170 years of build time – Twitter.
A FT232H breakout board with Santa! – Twitter.
Aimed at Python beginners: replacing standard traceback by something easier to understand – GitHub.
A Game Boy emulator written in Python – GitHub.
PEP 8101 – 2020 Term steering council election, Guido van Rossum is no longer on it.
Awesome Data Science with Python – GitHub.
Top 10 Python Open Source Projects On GitHub: 2019 – Linux.com
Setting up a Raspberry Pi 4 as a development machine for your iPad Pro – sausheong’s space.
Creating an animated Christmas Tree in your terminal with Python – YouTube.
Creating Interactive Dashboards from Jupyter Notebooks – Practical Business Python.
A simple tool to make ASCII art from an image using Excel colored cells – GitHub. Try it!
SpectroGraphic: Turn any image into a sound whose spectrogram looks like the image! – GitHub.
Reinvented Magazine, Women in STEM: Issue 2 LADIES WHO HACK arrived and it features our Ladyada on the cover! Women in STEM – Reinvented Magazine.
“Reinvented has a single mission in mind: to reinvent the general perception of women in STEM fields while inspiring interest in STEM for young women nationwide. Reinvented Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that aspires to break barriers and aid the movement to get more girls involved in STEM by creating the nation’s first print magazine for women in STEM.”
Read more. You can subscribe to print for all of 2020, or subscribe to digital. You can also get the second issue featuring our Ladyada “Ladies who Hack” on the cover as a print edition or digital edition.
Happy Holidays 🙂
#ICYDNCI What was the most popular, most clicked link, in last week’s newsletter? MicroPython version 1.12 released.
CircuitPython Weekly NOTES ONLY EDITION for December 27th, 2019 notes document.
Take Flight with Feather – Hackaday and Digi-Key
THIS IS IT! There is maybe a couple hours left to enter!
The Adafruit Feather is the latest platform for microcontroller development, and companies like Particle, Sparkfun, and Seeed Studios are producing Feather-compatible devices for development and prototyping. Now it’s your turn. Design a board to fit in the Feather ecosystem and we’ll manufacture it. The best project in the Take Flight With Feather contest will be sent off to pick and place machines and head straight to the Digi-Key warehouse!
To get started, take a look at the current Feather ecosystem and get acquainted with the GitHub repo filled with examples and tutorials.
There are over 70+ entries at this time!
Stop by hackaday.io for more details!
Coming soon
Rezz Inspired NeoPixel Glasses, coming soon on YouTube.
We’re testing the “fresh-from-the-oven” ItsyBitsy nRF52840 – it’s a double-sided design to make it so smol and cute! – YouTube.
Android Bluefruit Playground Tone Generator – YouTube and Temperature and Light Sensor!
New Learn Guides!
Bluefruit TFT Gizmo ANCS Notifier for iOS from John Park
Adafruit PyPortal Titano from Kattni
Wooden NeoPixel Xmas Tree from Liz Clark
CircuitPython Libraries and Jupyter Notebook on any Computer with MCP2221 from Brent Rubell
CircuitPython Libraries on any Computer with MCP2221 from Carter Nelson
LSM6DSOX and ISM330DHC 6 DoF IMU from Bryan Siepert
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!
Keep checking back for more updated guides!
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 the CircuitPython.org Contributing page. We’ve included open pull requests and issues from the libraries, 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 205!
Updated Libraries!
Here’s this week’s updated CircuitPython libraries:
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:
| Library |
Last Week |
Total |
| Adafruit-Blinka |
2208 |
38864 |
| Adafruit_CircuitPython_BusDevice |
1227 |
23076 |
| Adafruit_CircuitPython_Register |
317 |
4786 |
| Adafruit_CircuitPython_NeoPixel |
282 |
4840 |
| Adafruit_CircuitPython_ESP32SPI |
244 |
2582 |
| Adafruit_CircuitPython_MCP230xx |
216 |
9259 |
| Adafruit_CircuitPython_FeatherWing |
202 |
1247 |
| Adafruit_CircuitPython_Motor |
171 |
3257 |
| Adafruit_CircuitPython_seesaw |
163 |
2619 |
| Adafruit_CircuitPython_ServoKit |
162 |
2893 |
Upcoming events!
Cambridge Python’s first meeting of 2020 (UK) will be with Nicholas Tollervey: Developing Developers – Meetup. Tues, Jan 7, 2020.
Scott is speaking at PyCascades about Python’s Next Decade and Us. It’s February 8th and 9th, 2020.
“PyCascades is a two-day, single-track Python conference. We previously hosted PyCascades in Vancouver and Seattle. For our third iteration in 2020 we’ll be in Portland, Oregon USA. PyCascades is organized by members of the Python communities in Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland. We aim to bring together Python users and developers from both the Pacific Northwest and around the world.”
April 15-23, 2020, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA – The PyCon 2020 conference, which will take place in Pittsburgh, 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 2020.
Latest releases
CircuitPython’s stable release is 4.1.2 and its unstable release is 5.0.0-beta.2. New to CircuitPython? Start with our Welcome to CircuitPython Guide.
20191223 is the latest CircuitPython library bundle.
v1.12 is the latest MicroPython release. Documentation for it is here.
3.8.1 is the latest Python release. The latest pre-release version is 3.9.0a2.
1,545 Stars Like CircuitPython? Star it on GitHub!
Call for help – CircuitPython messaging to other languages!
We have posted on the Adafruit blog about bringing CircuitPython messaging to other languages, one of the exciting features of CircuitPython 4.x and above 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.
jobs.adafruit.com has returned and folks are posting their skills (including CircuitPython) and companies are looking for talented makers to join their companies – from Digi-Key, to Hackaday, Microcenter, Raspberry Pi and more.
15,618 thanks!
The Adafruit Discord community, where we do all our CircuitPython development in the open, reached over 15,618 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’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.
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.
And lastly, we are working up a one-spot destination for all things podcast-able here – podcasts.adafruit.com
Codecademy “Learn Hardware Programming with CircuitPython”
Codecademy, an online interactive learning platform used by more than 45 million people, has teamed up with the leading manufacturer in STEAM electronics, Adafruit Industries, to create a coding course, “Learn Hardware Programming with CircuitPython”. The course is now available in the Codecademy catalog.
Python is a highly versatile, easy to learn programming language that a wide range of people, from visual effects artists in Hollywood to mission control at NASA, use to quickly solve problems. But you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to accomplish amazing things with it. This new course introduces programmers to Python by way of a microcontroller — CircuitPython — which is a Python-based programming language optimized for use on hardware.
CircuitPython’s hardware-ready design makes it easier than ever to program a variety of single-board computers, and this course gets you from no experience to working prototype faster than ever before. Codecademy’s interactive learning environment, combined with Adafruit’s highly rated Circuit Playground Express, present aspiring hardware hackers with a never-before-seen opportunity to learn hardware programming seamlessly online.
Whether for those who are new to programming, or for those who want to expand their skill set to include physical computing, this course will have students getting familiar with Python and creating incredible projects along the way. By the end, students will have built their own bike lights, drum machine, and even a moisture detector that can tell when it’s time to water a plant.
Visit Codecademy to access the Learn Hardware Programming with CircuitPython course and Adafruit to purchase a Circuit Playground Express.
Codecademy has helped more than 45 million people around the world upgrade their careers with technology skills. The company’s online interactive learning platform is widely recognized for providing an accessible, flexible, and engaging experience for beginners and experienced programmers alike. Codecademy has raised a total of $43 million from investors including Union Square Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Thrive Capital, Naspers, Yuri Milner and Richard Branson, most recently raising its $30 million Series C in July 2016.
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.
