 All right, Python on hardware time. Blink-a-blink-a-blink-a-blink-a-blink-a-blink-a-blink-a-blink-a. This week on the newsletter, please subscribe. By the way, I'll talk about where to find this out. Lots of things going on. We're almost ready for 8.1 release. CandidZero is out. Lots of great projects, including a physical, motorized Minecraft box made with Lego. And there is a review of MicroPython 1.20. Since we're getting close to 8.1.0, CandidZero, you were going to talk, the synth stuff is coming along, right? Yeah, some of that I'm most excited. Well, I mean, there's a lot of bug fixes. You want to scroll down because there's some. Yeah, there's a list. First off, PsyLabs contributed and do 24 port. And we're actually chatting with them so we might make a board or stock a board from their staff. We got a contribution for NMA and GIF support so you can like now play GIFs within CircuitPython. DVI support for our, you know, like native DVI so you can have CircuitPython where Apple go to a TV screen, which is just hilarious and fun. And you also do like, you know, HDMI graphics from RP2040. You can also change the CPU frequency dynamically on the RP2040, which is part of that DVI, the Pico DVI project, because you have to overclock the chip. The synthio stuff is really cool. That is what Jebler has been working on. He says he's like kind of finished for now, but if you want to like make fairly complicated synthesizers natively, like, you know, it's not a sampler. It's like you're creating waveforms and LFOs and you add them and subtract them and do stuff and you have envelopes. Check out the synthio interface. It's something that I wanted CircuitPython to do. I thought it would be really fun to be able to make synthesizers from within CircuitPython. That's one of my favorite stuff. There's also a lot of bug fixes as well. Yeah. And as mentioned in the chat, kind of a big deal. Silicon Labs contributing a core. Kind of a big deal. Like this is happening. We have a momentum. They're actually like, hey, this is important. We want a lot of people to use this. It's been battle tested. Someone today, I think, I don't remember which social media site I was on. Wow, I started off at CircuitPython 3 and now you're already up to 8. This is kind of neat. And the board they had, it just worked. So before I talk about that, and speaking of, is I think that this project is worth noting kind of cool. This is reviving assistive technology with quirky and micro-ready keypads. So this is, you can see your hand on it like that. It's a quarter. But it's an LCD. Yeah. And you could tell you could do one-handed typing. But it's CircuitPython code for the Raspberry Pi Pico version of the quirky keyboard based on the work done by MicroRider. The device emulates a USB HID, USB keyboard, and no specific driver. But if you use the Adafruit HID CircuitPython libraries, you can do quite a bit more. So check it out. I think that's another neat example of being able to take hardware that really can't be used with modern equipment, but using something like CircuitPython. And then as you follow along with CircuitPython, one of the neat things, and this is one of my favorite makers, so I'll go over to this screenshot. Yeah. So this is, let me move us for a second here. This is always kind of neat because here's a maker that has these like Minifig CircuitPython compatible devices. And every single time there's a new version of CircuitPython, right away out of the box, it's fully supported. You just drag over the file and right away you get all the new features. So this is one of the things that was important to us is how do we empower makers who want to do their own boards and they just don't want to like manage firmware forever. Yeah, we'll support firmware, we'll basically support your board forever as long as we don't do anything special for it. But we have so many different chips that are supported out of the box that if you submit a board definition, it'll be CircuitPython forever and that's how we got to over 400 boards. Yeah. And I think, you know, we just met with Eric from SEED, Zach from Particle. And I was trying to do some rounds with talking to some of the folks out there from Arduino to every board maker. And there is like a drift in the market, like there is, you know, companies that are just going in a different direction than like making things for others to build off of. They want you to buy their platform, only use their services and that's it. And if you're someone who wants to build a business or build an ecosystem, that's kind of hard because you can't really do a lot of stuff with it. So seeing this maker, Ben, who's been doing this for a while and then seeing well more than half of the 400 boards that are CircuitPython compatible, people being able to build companies and businesses around them, that's really neat. So that's why I think this one is a good example. It's like everyone when they see this board, they're like, oh my god, it's a keyboard. But it's a good example, this person doesn't have to manage firmware. It's always just works. No builds required. Yeah. Generate all the, you know, every commit generates all the UF2s and bin files necessary. We can always test the latest. And one other note, if you want to learn more about that board, I think we have a little note here. Yeah. So the CircuitPython show, Paul's in the chat here. He just interviewed Ben. So that's coming up soon. You'll be able to listen in about this board and more. So that's kind of cool. There's a story of a CircuitPython show. The newsletter is available at aforddaily.com. 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