 Next up, it is Python on Hardware Time. All right, so I've got an extended version, I'm just going to do a quick recap of some of the things from the newsletter, and then I'm going to talk about, you know, I normally do a random stuff like that, but there's always like a moral of the story, or there's like, hey, this is like the next action to do good. This is a good one, and all coincides with Happy Birthday MicroPython. Mr. Eighth Birthday, turned eight years old on April 29th. 2013 was when Damien, the creator of MicroPython, wrote the first line of code private before anyone knew about it, before it was even called MicroPython. Now MicroPython is used in all sorts of microcontrollers, and more version 1.15 was just released two weeks ago with some great features. So in the newsletter, you can see all the things that are going on in the world of Python. Python Software Foundation just added Microsoft as a visionary sponsor. Adafruit is a, I think, I think we're called participant sponsor. So we're sponsoring PyCon this year. You can check out Tom's hardware with a review of the Adafruit Itzy Bitsy RP2040. They've been doing all this. God has a deep dive, does these each week. You can see all sorts of projects. I'm just going to highlight a couple before I go into the MicroPython birthday stuff and neat story about open source. This I thought was cool. This is a Black Panther smart display, alarm clock, and it uses Marvel's API. I didn't know Marvel had an API. It's cool. And I don't know why I didn't know this is like. Of course I do. So anyway, check it out. You can get all the neat stats and all sorts of things from the Marvel universe. Todd's still working on this mini controller. We've got the Trinky Dance Party. This is using colors and all sorts of things with the Adafruit Neo Trinky and Circuit Python. A lot of these are Circuit Python, the visual thermometer. This is a theremin. Here's a really neat pool temperature project that you have the temperature of the pool sends it to a mag tag on the refrigerator. And that's when the grandkids will then know. And this is the story behind this when it's OK to go in the pool because that'd be a certain temperature. And this is on Hackaday IO. So lots of good stuff, so many projects, too many. It's getting to the point each week that it's nearly impossible to keep track of everything. Lots of keyboard projects this week, too. But you name it, it's being made in Python. And I think we're at a good spot where we could talk about one of the many successes in open source because people are like, why do you open source? So here's this week's talk I wanted to do. Do you want to get a little thing? It's like Phil's talk. Happy birthday. I had an article thing at make. It was called Phil's Soapbox. Happy birthday, MicroPython, eight years old. And one of the cool things about MicroPython is it's open source. That's right. And there's lots of ways. It's very open source. Yeah, there's lots of ways you can support an open source project or company or individuals. Oh, you mean like giving money to the FSF? I wouldn't suggest we discuss the FSF during this segment. We're going to stick to MicroPython. You mean there's no other ways to support open source? Yeah. So one of the ways you can do it is I just did a very quick search on our blog. So we have 883 posts dedicated to MicroPython. There's a lot more. But that's just the top. And you can search via Google site specific and see there's probably thousands by now. And so one of the things that you can do when you want to help open source is get the word out about good things they're doing, so more developers get involved, more people who want to do documentation, more people who want to do events, more every but there's a there's a role for everyone in open source. That's one of the things you can do. And if we were to have little check boxes check, we did that. But this is all stuff that everyone could do. Here's the other thing. Let's say you have an electronic store like Adafruit.com. Well, Damien and his company made the pie board. We stock the pie board. We buy the pie board. We send Damien money. That's right. And then we get pie boards and then we sell them to you. And we sell the accessories too. So that is a way to support. Yes. So you got you could get the word out, bring people together, write about things, celebrate stuff. You could physically buy stuff. There's nothing you can do. Oh, and we also have some of the accessories, by the way. Yeah. And you could go to our website and you could check out pie board and micropython pie board, all that stuff. And you can buy them right now. Other thing we did was like, well, this is kind of cool. Let's make a sticker. And this was they had artwork, but we said, hey, we can we can make the artwork print ready. And we'll make stickers. And one of the things we did with the sticker, because you're like, oh, you're just making micropython stickers. What are you going to do with all that sticker money? Well, we have this little notice that's very specific that says, hey, sticker purchase helps micropython. Well, the deal is not a lot of people buy stickers. Some people buy boards. Some people read the blog. Eight years has gone by. So we saw that this year, micropython has sponsorship enabled on GitHub. And the way it works is you give them money. If you're on GitHub, and right now, I think they're waiving the fees. And you could be an individual sponsor. You can now be an organizational sponsor. And basically what it does, when you give them money and they have goals they want to get to $5,000 a month, continued maintenance of the software, recruiting additional maintainers of things like GitHub issues, funding, purchase of development boards for new platforms, offering bounties for fixing bugs, investing in opportunities for paid development and paid documentation improvements. So this year was a different year because there's sponsorships on GitHub. You can sponsor one time. You can also sponsor as organization because it's all new stuff with GitHub. Two years ago, we did a donation. We didn't talk about we didn't do anything. We just said, hey, Damien, and we just gave them the money. We said, happy sixth birthday. Here's $6,000 to help the development with micropython because we build on top of micropython just like other bits of open source. And that's where the core of Circuit Python comes from because we do things like make hardware and we make enough money to do other things with it like give it to our employees. And give it to other folks and donate to folks. So this is success in action with open source software and hardware. So what we did was we looked and we said, hey, look at these sponsors. There's about 50 people that are sponsoring altogether. They're about 25% of their goal. And I was looking at the way GitHub allows you to do stuff as organization now. So I flipped me from Phil to Ada Fruit because it says, hey, do you want to sponsor as Ada Fruit? I'm like, yeah, that's what we want to do. We want to sponsor as Ada Fruit. And I hit the button and it said, congratulations, you sponsored micropython, 5,000 bucks. So money's tight for us, just like it is for everybody else. We're recovering, we're trying to hire, but we had enough budget. We did a Python sponsorship and this is our micropython sponsorship. And I got this cute little email with, this is Mona, the Octocat. Happy month. And that's $5,000 donation. And that means that they hit their goal for the month. Now it doesn't show in the progress meter the same way because this is a one-time. So what we're hoping is other people or other organizations match as Ada Fruit and says, hey, I'm a company that bases my stuff on micropython too. I'm gonna take care of one full month. Bang, go in there. So we did it. And this is where they're at with the recurring ones, they're 25%. And then we did a one-time for 5K. Now the cool thing about all this is people notice. And this is a tweet we saw. And we're just like, whoa, that guy sounds familiar. Well, that was Nat Friedman, the co-founder and CEO of GitHub and said, very cool to see the fine folks at GitHub. Give $5,000 to micropython project with GitHub sponsors. Happy birthday, micropython. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it'd be cool. So this is how open source can work. So some folks would say, well, there's no business model in any of this. You can't possibly sell hardware software, give it all away. You can't do it, can't do it. And like, oh, there's different versions of everything. How come there's not just one version? All these things. Yeah, but you say. Well, we're just proving there is a model that can work. Correct. And so we're hoping that other people get encouraged, consider sponsoring micropython. You can buy hardware from Adafruit, the boards. You can also buy our hardware that has circuit Python on it. Or even something like make code Arduino because you know what we're gonna do with some of the money? And so that is this week's, you know. Fill soapbox. Rant, soapbox, whatever. Not the soapbox. But if you're building your stuff up open source, there are ways that you can do things. And most of all, we're all just not like avatars and robots that do pull requests. We're humans. I think it's a good way to show that you appreciate what they're doing. Of course, contribute to the code. Of course, do things like documentation. Of course, be in the community and be helpful. But if you have some way to sponsor in some way, please consider doing it. Yes. Happy eighth birthday, micropython. Happy birthday to you. And the Spice On Harbour News. Thank you, Blinka. Thank you, Micropython Snake, whatever your name is.