 It is now time for Python on Hardware News. Blinker! Blinker! Blinker! So some significant news in my opinion, as someone who works on this newsletter and watching this thing called CircuitPython. Serpentay is now a success story. The title of our newsletter this week was CircuitPython Empowering Makers to Make Businesses. So this is a Serpentay, it's from Arturo. You can see it's 15 bucks a pop. We sell them on Adafruit. They're also on Tindi.com. They have pretty much universal five-star reviews. Arturo was able to make hardware and not have to worry about the software as much because Arturo used CircuitPython. So CircuitPython, much like Python, is one of those batteries included every time there's an update. She gets an update. And one of the things, because I wrote this up as one thing, as far as like a little mini case study, as they say in the biz world, Arturo sold 400 of these. So they've done it without the awesome power of CircuitPython. And it is something that we see taking off. For open source hardware makers or pretty much anyone, Sony today, they're their board, the Spresens. They get all the new features of CircuitPython every time there's an update. So they just send their customers over to circuitpython.org slash downloads. There's a picture of the board. And it's literally just as easy as dragging and dropping a file. And now you've got the latest version of CircuitPython. Yeah. And we're adding more and more. We just added microlab. It's going to be coming out in a new release. We're working on adding RG matrices. There's a lot of stuff that you don't have to worry about if your board is ported to CircuitPython and is part of our build platform. We have like a hundred and plus boards that are already in there. It's very easy. I expect this is going to be very similar to what I saw when I was writing about Arduino. So a million years ago I wrote an article, why Arduino, why it's here to stay. And at the very end I said the things that are that make an electronic platform successful, that's going to happen no matter what the shape of the board. And this reminds me of that. So what I'm seeing is people that do hardware, they're like, how can I focus on the hardware? How can I keep the cost down? How can I make something that has Bluetooth? How can I make something that has Wi-Fi? How can I make something that has a display? All that stuff just delays your ability to ship hardware unless you can get something that's baked in open source. And there's a big community behind it so there's frequent updates. So this is the, every news article about the world right now has a chart and like I don't want to make a chart like this. But it looks like CircuitPython is following the number of boards that we have. There's over 116 boards, the number of libraries, there's over 200. It has that same adoption curve that you see for really large electronic platforms. So what do we need? Speaking of, so while the open hardware summit is gone virtual, there are still things going on with the hardware. So this is a tray. This is from SparkFun. If you look really, really, really, really close, you can see Blinka in there. So some of the badges have Blinka on it. Here's the tester and here's a pack that was getting shipped off. Let's go to the overhead real quick. We have one. Thank you, Drew. This arrived today. This is the QR code where you can get the information about the badge and it's a wearable. You can see the size. This would fit well on a radiator wrist or any wrist. And this is, I think, one of the first prototypes that were made because eventually there was these. You can see the little purple, yeah, little Oshpark niblets. We'll probably be doing some projects with this and more. It's very similar to the Clue. So probably a lot of the things that you do with Clue will work on this. And then this particular wearable platform badge and all the things it does will always be updated as we update CircuitPython. So this is a really neat thing that will last a very, very long time. The Open Hardware Summit physical one will be next year. I fully expect people to be hacking on these badges over the next year. So we'll probably see a lot of cool projects. That is the open hardware badge. There is a new extension community made for Visual Studio Code. This is from Joe. Joe wanted to bring the entire CircuitPython workflow into a single place in VS Code. This was inspired by Scott Hanselman's blog post in the VS Code Arduino extension. And it's in the Visual Studio Marketplace right now. The open serial console will prompt you for a serial port to connect to. Then I'll display the serial port output from the board attached to the board. So if you like tools like Mew but you like to use things like Visual Studio Code, this is for you. This looks really nice. I might try this out. I love how there's like, it's not too much. You know, like some IDEs are just so intense. I like how this is, it's very simple. Like the simplicity is important. Next up, Jay made a really fantastic tutorial on how to make a CircuitPython GPS locator. So these are my favorite. These are single serving devices. People always say, oh, why don't you get a phone? Well, a phone's not going to work all the time. And a phone can get turned off in a variety of ways. Or you can install an app where now you have the overhead of a phone and you have a monthly service plan and all that stuff. This is a very straightforward, easy to make GPS that displays all sorts of things. 3D printed case. Very cool project. Thank you for sharing it, Jay. Biggest news, I think, microlab. You can crunch numbers fast with CircuitPython. Jepler worked on this. And it is one of the neatest things I've seen to come to CircuitPython. Because now you can do a bunch of number crunching tasks in CircuitPython. And about 10 times as fast. Yes, for sensors. For doing like stuff that you want to visualize. I mean, CircuitPython, it's powerful, but it's interpreted. So if you have, you know, an array of 100 numbers and you want to perform an operation all of them, you would normally have to go through and iterate through that array, which, you know, it takes more time in Python. Using uLab, it's like NumPy. It's the same thing. It's like you have an array type. And they can perform operations very quickly in all of them. And because it's low level written in C instead of doing the interpreter for every step, it's very, very fast. You can do a lot of mathematical features. It's not exactly like NumPy, but it's heavily inspired by NumPy. So if you use NumPy, you'll be like, oh yeah, I know what this does. It's familiar. But obviously we couldn't fit everything. We did the IoT design week with Microchip, wizard of make Bob Martin. So if you want to see this, you can go to Microchip's YouTube channel and see the entire hour long session. Thank you so much Microchip for broadcasting this. This was a virtual event planned ahead of time and it was not because something was canceled, by the way. So handy. We were ready to go. Yeah, we already did it. Last week we did IonMPI and we did an introduction to the ESP32 S2 and talked a little bit about how we're going to run Circuit Python and tiny USB on it. Check out that segment. It's also newsletter in beta, adafruitdaily.com. And we're going to have the newsletter, the blog post and everything go out about the same time each week. So check that out if you want to get the latest and greatest on where you can get these new chips and more. And of course, some of the things that we're doing with Circuit Python. This is kind of cool. This is a Game of Life made with Circuit Python. Brandon made this and it's on a screen and it's staring, starring the one and only Linca. Yeah, look at the tile action. So this is using the built-in tile capability of DisplayIO. You can't tell. This is the Feather M4 airlift featherwing plus Ethernet Circuit Python. It snakes its way to Cat5. That's right. We got that working this week. Kevin made a video on panelizing Circuit boards using KeyCat. This one happens to be the Circuit Brain board powered by Circuit Python. This is another business example of using Circuit Python. This crowd supply is going to be going live and you'll be able to purchase these boards that Kevin made and Circuit Python is built right in. Yay. This is from Ben, who makes these really cute Lego minifig looking Circuit Python things. And if you look at the video really closely, he was like, oh, Circuit Python 5 came out. New version. Let me see how long it takes. And it was about the same time it took to tweet. That's how fast. This is kind of cool. Greg got the Circuit Python REPL that Zobbs ported over to FOMA running on the Orange Crab. That's exciting. Liz is working on this very cool step counter based on Clue, Circuit Python. Special shout out and thanks to Novelbits. They do an excellent Bluetooth industry report. And this is like when like a Bluetooth celebrity, you know, SEMPA, I noticed us. This is neat. They are the standard for I think the best Bluetooth newsletter. I do subscribe to a bunch and it was great to see our board in there. So if you haven't already, check out the Novelbits Bluetooth industry report, especially if you're into this stuff. Another thing that was posted, this is from GojimiPy. They published their quest to get Circuit Python on a soft RISC 5 CPU on the ECP5 FPGA for the RIDONA ULX3X. That was not far. I got through it. Anyways, Circuit Python for RISC 5. FPGA running RISC 5 and then Circuit Python on top of that. Yeah. This is a really neat Circuit Python based light up glove complete with Iron Man Paul ring. Nice. Fancy. And then Ladyita, what do you call a gathering in a group of crickets? Do you know? I heard, I don't know. An orchestra. An orchestra. Yeah. So this is an orchestra of crickets and Circuit Python. This is kind of cool. Sam posted up some great X-rays of some boards including the Feather Compatible Orange Crab. We're sending Sam out a bunch of our boards and hopefully we'll have some cool X-ray photos of them soon. Oh, it had posted up a delightful creation. This is a feather wing prototype using the Bantam tools mill. It's a classy way to display seven segments. Toot. This is a feather adapter for the Onion Omega by Tisham and the files are available on GitHub. This is the clue running on a Gigglebot and this is from ClioQC. So all of the micro bit accessories that we've been testing out have been working out so far and a lot of people in the community has been testing them as well. Microbit released kind of good time in classroom.microbit.org. You can do this virtual or in person and have kids learn about Python or make code all inside their interface. It works really well. We have a guide that we also just published. Can you post it up a new guide? This is for putting Badger, our series of programs and more that lets you make name badges and anything for any type of event that you want. Post it up a video on doing Morse code between a couple of different clues. What can the clue do? And last up, we're working with our teams. We're expecting PyCon to make announcements. So far, PyCon is still on. It's April 15th to the 23rd. We'll see if that continues to happen. However, we are prepared for anything, including making sure people can tune into anything if it goes virtual. And that is the Python on Hardware News for this week.