 It's Python on Hardware Time. Blanka-blanka-blanka. So I'm going to talk about some of the things in the world of Python on Hardware. And then I have something that's a little bit of a tangent, but I think it's a good example of some Python stuff going on. And then a little bit of a success story, and then a cautionary tale that maybe we can all work on. Wow, I feel like I'm just going to like. I'm going to have a whole movie in front of me. Yeah, it's going to be a little bit like that. It's part of the Marvel universe. So Circuit Python 6.2.0 was released. Released, released. I know we've been doing betas and betas and betas, but we're really done 6.2. I mean, we'll do a 6.21 if necessary, any of the bug fixes. But we're starting to work on seven. So a lot of stuff happened in six. We added RP2040 support. We did a lot of USB work. We added a lot more boards. A lot of graphic stuff happened. I mean, these are all the changes since beta 4. But overall, which are a lot of bug fixes, but overall, we have done a ton of work in six. And we're excited to do seven. Seven is going to have more M7 IMX support, probably also do a little bit more RP2040 stuff, and more. So thank you to all the contributors. I'm going to talk about how people are contributing in a second or something that someone tweeted. They got their first contribution to an open source project, accepted and merged back to the master branch, Driverbug Fixer Circuit Python Driver for the BNO005. Thank you. In every place that we release Circuit Python, we always thank all the contributors. Thank you so much. Thank you. Everybody, this is a very good, functional, healthy, open source community that is publishing a lot of software and taking in lots of contributions. So thanks, everybody, for making that happen. I'm going to talk about that in a second and how there are some good success stories in that. Because you always don't hear about the success stories. Don't forget, Bernard Reissummit, is this? Weekend. Well, it's Friday, which is kind of like a weekend. Early weekend. Scott's Deep Dive series, celebrating one year this week. Congratulations, Scott. So he's been doing these for one year. If you want to see the building of something like Circuit Python, which is going to be up to 200 boards soon. We have 196 boards. We're getting close. Over 300 libraries. If you want to see a lot of the smarts that went into this, check out Deep Dive every single week. And the cats. Yeah. The other thing is some emergent trends we're seeing, the circuit Python being able to show up as a USB drive. And it being so easy to do things like a keyboard and people having more access to things like PCB design software or something like Topico, which runs Circuit Python, or having all these keyboards that they've always wanted to build and being able to kind of put these together in lots of different ways. We're seeing tons and tons of keyboards. So I think with all of the work that you're doing now with getting more keyboard stuff into the shop, the ease of use for something like Circuit Python, and then the accessibility for all of the resources to figure out how to make this, and then being able to do it, there's a lot of people that making their own keyboards is going to be their very first project. It was very hard for them to do it before. Now it's going to be really easy. Now hold that thought, because not everyone likes things easy. But how? What does that mean? But we're seeing more keyboards ever in the entire, like for me starting Hackaday and covering stuff at Meg, I'm seeing more keyboard projects now that people who, this is like one of the first projects they're doing, publishing and getting out there and sharing with others. So it's kind of cool. So MacroPads more, also I think because of stream decks and stuff like that, people are using more than just a keyboard control. It's like everyone has a computer constantly. They want to make cool interface with them. So this is the Dazzler and GameBlueno circuit Python to create sprite animations. Those are really neat. How to use circuit Python with GPIO on a PC. That's the FT-202 thing. More MacroPads. MacroPads. MacroPads, MacroPads, MacroPads. This is the ambient temperature reactor orb, a Raspberry Pi Pico with MicroPython example, MicroPython 3D printed drawing robot example, a Pico CO2 based carrier board with display, a Pi keyboard that uses circuit Python. Keyboard keyboard. Yeah, so. Audio matrix, LEDs, cats. This is a circuit Python to produce audio with a meow bit and has a cat. If you want to see or experience the pulse of what's going on on MicroPython, check out the slides and all the notes from the Melbourne MicroPython. They've got great notes, a great community. We added, there's a book that just came out in French that's circuit Python. We added that to awesome circuit Python. So if you check out github.com, 4 slash 8 fruit, 4 slash awesome, that circuit Python, you could see all of the resources, boards, links, news articles, and more. We keep it on GitHub. Feel free to do a pull request if you find anything. Other odds and ends. We have a video that shows you how to use Feather 2040. This is someone else made it, but the new chip is out. So a lot of folks are exploring it. We have an oldie, but a goodie. These are circuit Python powered sneakers. So these are like the little NASX devil shoes. But this is like, what if you want to just use your existing shoes and like 3D print little Adafruit logo? Don't worry, Nike's not going to sue you. And you don't have to get a special edition 1 out of 666. You can just 3D print these yourself. Yeah. And this is flexible PCBs with circuit Python and a whole bunch more. Macro pads, macro pads, macro pads, Picas. Yeah. USB 32s 2s, and more. So, I love it. Yeah, I also wanted to mention, if you want to check out the Pico PyCorder, this is using the Pico and making a, it was just like first contact day for Star Trek. So you can check out this Raspberry PyPico running circuit Python for this Elkars-like interface. This is kind of neat. This is a mag tag, moon crescent bargex, so it shows the phases of the moon, and so much more. So I wanted to talk about two things. I'll get to the contributions and open source and how to get them. But I did want to mention something. So today was like, if you're into particle physics. You're into particle physics. Yeah, so the moon was spun around. And the standard model, we still might need new physics. We still might have new physics. There is mysterious particles out there. There's mysterious matter that we don't know about yet. And that was the news today. And I watched the video about this interesting possible discovery. Apparently you need a little bit more for it to be official discovery. It's like five sigma, then it's an discovery. But basically, an experiment from a long time ago showed that this wobbling particle wobbled a little bit more than maybe it should. So it's probably hitting these antiparticles as it runs around of what they are. Who knows? And there's a particle zoo at the moment that it is what it is. There's quantum mechanics. And then there's relativity. And we don't have something that works with gravity. So this is neat. And one of the things that I always like to figure out is what tools did they use? What tools did they use? A million years ago, I interviewed Brian Green, string theorist for Make. And I said, do y'all use instant message? And it was like 10 years ago now. And he's like, this is the first time someone ever asked me. I'm like, because it can't all be chalkboards. I want to know what are the tools you use every day? Right. They discord it. What's good with that? We've got gossip about particles. Like, how does it work out? So anyways, if you watch the video and I put it on our blog post about this, it's Python. They're using Jupyter Notebooks. This is the series of numbers that they wanted to get down to a certain amount of precision. And so if you're learning, and it's like, I was like, oh my gosh. The numbers are just green, and there's pink, and there's blue, and they're. Yeah, but you can check it out on the video. It goes by pretty fast. But here's a Jupyter Notebook. And it's like. That's cool. It's a Python. Yeah, here it is. And this is how they're figuring out, based on the results from running this, based on the supercomputers that are popping out the numbers. I see, they're like, here's the theory, and here's what actually happened. And then it's like, four sigma, three sigma out, from a standard, the deviation of what they're expecting. Yeah. Oh, no. So there are many particles. So the good news is, if you're into particle physics and you're a physicist, you have a bunch of work to do. Because it looks like there's other mysterious things. Dark matter, dark energy, and this. So you got a lot of discovery ahead. Now, the thing that I was talking about before, which was, how are we doing this circuit Python thing? And the reason why circuit Python, and I think Python is working out, because everyone gets to contribute. Yes. So if you are interested in physics and science, at some point someone had to learn Python, and eventually they used it to interact with this particle accelerator, it's not some unknown language that only the particle physicists know. No, it's Python. And so when you start doing computer science, or if you start doing electronics, I think it's really intimidating. And this was like, when we see this type of tweet, we're just like, this is great. So this is the person tweeted, aspiring roboticist. That's kind of cool. That's their name. I bet they're interested in robotics. And their contribution is now part of a high-profile open-source project. It's merged in, and it's for circuit Python. And every single circuit Python release, we have tons of contributors, we have our core team, that's how we ultimately even hire people and do stuff. And we didn't seek this person out. They found that this community was really good and really accepting to beginners and no matter what their contribution is. So I normally don't do this, because I try to not only focus on the positive stuff, but all of us can collectively work on something. So this was a comment I saw, and I'm just gonna summarize it. This person basically said, the maker movement is lowering standards. The maker movement is making it so anyone who wants to put an LED on a bike can do it. And they're just interested in that hello world and that project, and they're not really learning anything. It's lowering standards. And I think this is one of the worst things that, maybe that wasn't their intention, but I think this is one of the worst things you can say online to someone. Yeah, because who's standards? Yeah. What standard is it? Who came up with the standard? Yeah, and what is about these people that are coming into this tech world that you don't like? Is there something specific about them? Like, what's wrong with them? What is it? So, you know, some people call this gatekeeping. I remember when you were posting on AVR Freaks like 15 years ago. And they did. 20 years ago, but yeah. Yeah, well, okay, 15 or 20 years ago. And these engineers with 50 years of experience, they saw your name, Lediata, and they're like, get out of here, lady. Just get out of here. Yeah, they were angry. I wouldn't contribute to their wiki. And I said, I don't like wikis. And I still don't like wikis. But they didn't like the idea that you were making electronics so much easier for people. Because that meant the face of electronics was gonna change. That meant different people were gonna come in. So when y'all see these things about standards are lower or more people are gonna get in, I know it hurts, because at first I was just like, I was angry. It's actually a little bit when people say, oh, it's a toy. I used to hate it, but I actually love it. Whenever you hear somebody say, oh, that's a toy, that's when alarm bells should be going off because that means that it's a disruptive technology. And anything that's a toy is the next generation of technology that you just don't understand. Yeah. So it's like when people are like, oh, it's a toy language, or this is like toy hardware, or like this whole scientific endeavor is a toy. A toy is a play thing that is creative and fun. And that's what usually ends up being the disruptive technology that takes over from whatever is happening now. Right, like I remember the Raspberry Pi was a toy. Yeah. And now it's like half of industry uses it for single board computing. So I've seen this phrase used a lot. And a million years ago I wrote an article about Arduino and how it won in getting so many more people to get into electronics. And anything that came along later would be Arduino-like. And so I see this phrase used. So when we all see this, let's celebrate the successes, continue to get people in. But let's make sure, because this grows and it becomes dangerous and cancerous. And I'll tell you why. I've seen people and we've deleted this when they've tried to do this. Oh, MIT must have lowered the standards to let you in. We've gotten like crummy emails from kids. Yeah, that's true. So yeah, and so this is one of the things that people say and do. And then they're like, yeah, they did. Like I just totally cheated and lied and stole. Whatever makes you feel better. So, but this is the thing. What we wanna do. I still have nightmares about my hasty paper. What we wanna. It never ends, you know. What we wanna do is continue to do this, but as bad as it's painful as I saw that on another website that said the maker movement and all these Arduino things are lowering the standard for everyone. I knew that we're being successful. I knew the success is here. Because when they see that, they're seeing new people, different people from them, and it's freaking them out. Oh no, oh no, I'm not gonna have people like me only in engineering. And so this is, it's a good thing and we wanna move more towards this. Anyone can contribute and grow and do stuff. We all started out somewhere as a beginner. And if I can, I'm gonna try to go back and see if I can have this person see my note. I'm gonna say like, surely someone cared about you and wanted you to learn something when you were younger. Everyone was a beginner at one time. So don't say it's lowering standards when we're just getting more people in. This is, so anyways, one day I'll do a talk about helping to build good communities, but this idea that there are standards and some people should be allowed in and some people shouldn't is not the whole, that is not the way to get to a healthy open source community that contributes what you wanna be is in this spot where people can see their successes and maybe this will bring them on to an entire new career. And I'm happy to see that they didn't feel that there was some barrier or standards. They're just like, oh, I put the code out there, got merged in, yay. Anyways, so that's Python on hardware news this week. All right.