 Python hardware time. All right. The big news is every single year we do Circuit Python Day. So Circuit Python Day is this month, August 18th, 2023. It's a Friday. We have a full day of programming and more. We'll get the word out for folks to participate. You'll be able to pop into our shows. It'll just be a full day celebrating all things. Circuit Python, Python on hardware, join us. Our newsletter went out this week, Lady Eda. And the newsletter has a bunch of projects. It's conference season. I'll get to that in a second. Circuit Python 821 was released. Anything super big with this one? Like, so it's a release and there's a lot of bug fixes and a couple of boron borons got released. But the really interesting thing is that we are getting started on what's going to be in Python 9. And USB host is one of the things that, you know, it's not a secret. You see Scott working on it. USB host is going to be in there. So it'll be kind of neat. Cool. We did a recap of the Circuit Python hack chat. Also, Hackaday did a recap on their site. You can read that as well. We'll talk about some whipper snapper stuff soon. Circuit Python Day, MicroPython added Laura's port. Tom's hardware interviews, Josh Lowe. You can see a lot of cool Circuit Python stuff in that interview. Tons of Python resources. But the thing I wanted to ask you this week, Lady Eda, because it is DefCon season, it is a bad season. We just saw badges on show and tell, is why in the world would someone ever choose Python over other ways to do embedded development for conference badges? And the reason I ask is today, there was a blog post because there is Board Hack 2023 NFC badges. And I did get a chance to talk to the developer of this over email. And they said some really nice words. But I thought, huh, this would be a good time to ask Lady Eda, like, when people are thinking about making a badge, why would they choose something like MicroPython or Circuit Python versus other ways? Okay. Not saying anything's better. There's different strokes, different folks. But what would be the benefits of choosing a scripting language like Python for a conference badge? Well, one thing about conference badges is they're never done on time. They're always rushed, which is totally normal. They're a project. They use them for fun with friends. And you usually kind of rush around to get 10 to a couple hundred badges done before an event. And so speed of development is the most important. And what isn't important is not the security isn't like, obviously it says at DEF CON and people want to hack on stuff, but it's not like you have to keep all your code super private and compiled. And it's not like you have to make it difficult for people to work on. You want to make it really easy for people to work on. So one of the things about using embedded languages is, and I've covered this every time we do talks on MicroPython or Circuit Python, is the speed of iteration, especially for these big chips like the RP2040, big flash memories and the ESP32, which has like a very intense compilation process, is every time you want to do something, you're like compiling and updating, and it's minutes. And I do it all the time. Even with like Platform.io, you're kind of like waiting around a little bit. With embedded Python, that speed is like, it's so instant, like you can try things and you're just like so, so fast, like seconds, like less than seconds. Especially with Circuit Python, we're on save, it restarts. And so if you're doing development on drivers or on LED animations or anything where you're like, look, it doesn't have to be like perfect polish, it just has to work good enough for me to go to this event. And the second big thing is the ease for which you can get other people involved. You know, it definitely always, you have usually your booth, booth, and you have... We're playing a word game. How many things have the word booth in it? And I did phone booth, voting booth, and then we did trade booth, and then I was listening to this. Anyways, we played word game. He was very good at the booth one. I was not really on top of that one. He definitely won. He definitely won that version of the game. At your booth, you're giving away the badge of everyone's wearing them. People want to hang out and they're like, hang out with their laptops and they're like, oh, I want to change the animations or I want to change the message or I want to hack on it. I want to reverse engineer, debug something. And yes, this is like an NFC chip over here. And you're like, you know, you want to read NFC tags and maybe emulate them. And you know, I love, I love embedded development, but it's definitely like now you're installing another version of Python. Now you have a new IDE. Oh, you've got the wrong version of RMGCC. And then like six hours later, maybe you can compile and upload. And now you need drivers and somebody's on a Mac and it's like x86 and it's M2 and they don't stop. They don't have it. It's not signed. None of that matters when you're dealing with embedded languages. You plug it in, it shows up as a disk drive or you're using Thawney or you're using, you know, VS code or whatever. And you can instantly start coding. The code is visible there. It's not, I think people are like, what's what code is on here? I don't even know. How do I edit it? Because you have to like just get back to what the default code is before you can even start modifying it. But if it's embedded interpretive language, the interpreted language script is right there and you can immediately work on it. You know, I've done workshops where it's like 45 minutes just to get people to install the right drivers, to install the IDE, to like plug in whatever that's all gone with embedded interpretive languages, especially important at a place where like people are drunk, they're coming and going, they're going to a talk, they come back, they're like, shit, where was I? Wait, you know, we're you know, setting this on fire, we're like pushing shipply into the fountain at the Alexis park. You don't have time to install an IDE. You want to get onto it. So that's why I think. Okay. Circuit Python is great. My little odds and ends to add to what you said is they show up as USB drives if you use something like Circuit Python. So that's super easy. A lot of people have laptops. The other thing is interpretive languages are great for strings. So like, oh, yeah, internet stuff. And that's where everything that's where everything is heading. Like, you know, your version drinks and you get the strength and the data you want to parse bits and bytes and and then shift things around a lot of these things. If they're not maintainable, when you get home, you just toss it or just sits on a shelf forever. The way we set up Circuit Python, for example, when you go to circuitpython.org, there's always a new firmware for whatever you have to. So you can use this badge. We know people have used badges with Circuit Python for years for other projects. So the developer of this particular one, I said, hey, can I share this? And Thomas said, yes, thank you. I really like Circuit Python for stuff like this. The low bear of entry with the decisions of mass storage and auto reload on save. I find it great, especially for people who aren't programmers or electronic engineers. Wow. Yeah. That's so so yeah. And you know, we were on yeah. And like, you know, good news, bad news. We were on Hackaday recently. And there was some crummy comments. There's purists that say you should never have a scripting language on a microcontroller. But there were some people that had some insightful comments. And they said, look, expert gatekeeper jerk, I'm paraphrasing. Some people want to get started. And yeah, they can get to that. But they got to start somewhere. So don't be a jerk. Everyone was beginner once in their life. Not everyone is, you know, God yet. So this is a great way to get started. And you can always add more complexity and skills. But if you want to get started, especially when people haven't been doing embedded development for 60 years or 50 years or whatever, this is a way to get there. And I guess the only thing I'd say is I think you get the more diverse, interesting group of people when you allow beginners in. And you have beginners and something for them. Then if it's just like, you're the expert that worked on AS 400. And there's like four of you left on planet Earth, like, I think you want to meet new people too. So anyways, that's how that's how you can get all this exciting news and more eat it for daily. Deliver it in the way. Okay, let's keep going.