 It's that time again. This is Katney with your weekly Python on Hardware News. Every week, we put together the Python from Microcontrollers newsletter. It is available through AdafruitDaily.com. Head over to sign up and see all of the past and current newsletters, or tune in each week to hear what's going on. Adafruit is continuing to operate as an essential business under New York City Executive Order to provide assistance with the COVID-19 outbreak. Most employees are working remotely, while a few are working in the Adafruit factory to help manufacture and ship desperately needed PPE to the surrounding areas and beyond. This week, the National Association of Manufacturers highlighted Adafruit and Lady Aida for the changes made in support of the COVID-19 response effort, including retooling the manufacturing facility to create PPE, fulfilling requests for electronic components for essential medical machines and repurposing current products like thermal cameras to fit medical needs. They also discussed the importance of communication with the Adafruit team and the safety tools in place. Safety continues to be paramount with the factory remaining mostly empty with staggered shifts for the few still coming in. Manufacturing and preparation of face shields continues as Adafruit continues to provide PPE to the hospitals in the area. In an effort to make wearing PPE more comfortable for long periods, Adafruit designed an ear saver for use with disposable face masks. These are laser cut from the plastic left over from laser cutting face shields, maximizing the use of the available materials. While both of these items are available in the Adafruit shop, Adafruit is still only shipping essential COVID-19 orders. If you're looking to purchase Adafruit products at this time, consider purchasing from our partner digikey at digikey.com. The ESP32S2 was announced in September 2019 and is finally making its way into the hands of hobbyists. With Wi-Fi, a much faster CPU, scads of GPIO, ADCs, a RISC-5 co-processor, native USB, and the promise of very low current draw, the ESP32S2 may prove to be popular with hobbyists as it becomes established. To talk through the new chip's potential, Adafruit's Lady Aida and Scott will join hackaday.io on the hack chat. Learn everything you need to know about the ESP32S2 and how to put it to work for you. Tune in on Wednesday, May 6, 2020 at noon Pacific time. Circuit Python 5.3.0 stable, the latest minor revision of Circuit Python is now available. This release has a number of new features and improvements, including support for RGB matrix display, formerly known as Protomatter, making the colors used by the stage library compatible with those used in the display IO library, improvement to the STM32 and Litex ports and microlab, and updating to Sphinx 3 for documentation. Three new boards have been added since 5.2.0, the NFC copycat, the Nucleo F767Zi, and the Nucleo H743Zi2. As a hackathon exploration, Microsoft adapted an IoT Central Python library to create an MQTT-based Circuit Python library for Azure IoT. This library has been tested with the PyPortal and PyBadge. Both of these devices are able to connect via an ESP32 serving as a Wi-Fi co-processor. Microsoft asks interested parties to check it out and provide feedback via GitHub. If you're interested in seeing more of Circuit Python or MicroPython in Azure IoT, let them know by filling out a quick survey. This project follows work by Brent Rubel at Adafruit in creating the Adafruit Circuit Python Azure IoT library. The May issue of the Adafruit Internet of Things monthly newsletter is out with a great number of Circuit Python-related topics. You can catch the in case you missed it version on the Adafruit blog. With over 1400 subscribers, this monthly newsletter keeps you informed on everything IoT. Head over to adafruitdaily.com to subscribe. Springer has made over 400 textbooks free to download including computer science books on Python, deep learning, data science, and AI. If you're looking for some general programming books or Python programming books specifically, check out the list at bit.ly slash Springer CS. Adafruit has always been an open source hardware company predating the open source hardware association certification process. We have finally finished submitting all of our hardware to Oshawa for certification as open source. Adafruit is now the number one open source hardware certified company. This week, 161 new boards were certified including the Adafruit Ethernet Featherwing, the Huzzah 32 ESP32, and the Teensy 3x Feather adapter. The EVO M51 module is a feather size board featuring both a microchip SAMD51 controller and a Max 10 FPGA. The board is designed to support Circuit Python and is also programmable with the Arduino IDE. Check it out at alloriumtech.com slash EVO. The Melbourne MicroPython Meetup presents their March-April news roundup discussing the latest MicroPython news. This issue has a shout out to Adafruit and Scott on Circuit Python, especially loving the inspiring way that you folks are running the business in such a difficult time. Stay safe and keep up the amazing work. Last week we mentioned plastic logic and their flexible organic e-paper displays. This week they have two new video demonstrations featuring display updates via Bluetooth, the first with text and graphics updates and the second with bitmap files. You can find their code and more details at github.com slash plastic logic. The Fluff M0 is the simplest least expensive board in the Feather form factor with a microchip SAMD21 processor. Deshipu posts to Twitter, Adafruit's Feather boards are great but sometimes I'm too cheap to leave them in finished projects so I made a minimal replacement with practically everything removed. It has literally five components but still runs Circuit Python and has standard pins. Check it out on hackaday.io. The LEGO Spike Prime controller runs on MicroPython. This makes for some interesting projects like a Star Wars X-wing robot posted by BigLessP on Twitter for May the 4th. Kevin posts to Twitter using an Adafruit Clue and the Kittronic Zip Halo HD to build a temperature monitor using Circuit Python. If the temperature goes above 75 degrees Fahrenheit it turns red and if it drops below it turns blue. Kevin plans to use more microbit expansion boards with the Adafruit Clue. Learn how to build a simple USB HID 8 key mechanical micropad using Seaduino's Shower and Circuit Python. A detailed write-up can be found on makeandymake.github.io. David posts to Twitter using Circuit Python, the Adafruit Feather NRF 52840 and the Bluefruit Connect app to control a USB powered disco light. Robotic Masters posts to Twitter using an I-squared C OLED display with Circuit Python and their Robohat MM1. Find the Robohat MM1 on crowd supply. A post to the Python blog discusses a proposal made at this year's Python language summit regarding making F-strings the default in Python. When F-strings were added in version 3.6 it was suggested to make them the default but it was considered too significant of a breaking change. The proposal was reintroduced this year and is currently being discussed. Pi Image Search posts a tutorial on training a COVID-19 face mask detector with OpenCV, Keras TensorFlow and deep learning. Check it out at PiImageSearch.com. Learn about spatial data science tools with open source spatial analysis tools for Python, a quick guide. This quick tour of open source Python libraries available for geospatial analysis can be found on makepath.com. The number of Circuit Python supported microcontrollers and single board computers grows every week. This week there was one new board added to CircuitPython.org, the RockPyS. Are you interested in adding a new board to Circuit Python? Check out the Adafruit Learn system for a series of guides about getting your board added to Circuit Python and CircuitPython.org. There are three new Python on hardware-related guides in the Adafruit Learn system this week, including logging pulse-exymmetry data over Bluetooth using CircuitPython, the FeatherNRF52840, and an Adalogger FeatherWing in this guide from John Park. Hacking the UTI165 thermal fever scanner camera. The default software is Windows only, but this guide from Lady Aida includes using Python on macOS to use the fever scanner. The current number of Circuit Python libraries is 227. There is one new library this week, Adafruit Circuit Python BLE Berry Med Pulse Oximeter, as well as a number of updated libraries. As always, visit CircuitPython.org slash libraries to download the latest bundle. Included in this week's updates from the Circuit Python team, the highlight of Brian's week has been working on a project to add the joy of clacky keyboards to the Trellis family. He's working on a board that has the same 60 by 60 millimeter dimensions and tessellated I2C pads as the Trellis, Neotrellis, and Neotrellis M4. This one will be different from the other members of the Trellis because he's replaced the elastomer buttons with mechanical keyboard switches. Instead of the 4 by 4 grid of squishy elastomer buttons, you'll get a 3 by 3 array of sockets that fit standard Cherry MX switches. There are still a few things to figure out, but he's hopeful that this will pan out and perhaps be just the start. Dan released the BLE pulse oximeter library and enabled the learn guide for that to be published. He's also been going in circles a bit on some core changes for BLE packet buffer to make sure it works with the new Adafruit services, but expects that to be done soon. As well, he tried a BLE capable body weight scale and blood pressure monitor. Unfortunately, neither used the standard services defined by the Bluetooth organization, so there will be some reverse engineering. For fun, Jeff eagerly printed the new slim enclosure for the Adafruit Clue and used it for a little project with Display.io, a dice roller for the Fate role-playing game system. In Fate, you use four special dice, labeled plus, minus, and blank, together with your character's inherent skill to determine an outcome. It was a fun chance to learn a little more about how the accelerometer and proximity sensor work because you can either shake the clue or touch the sensor above the screen to roll the dice. Melissa worked on adding the RockPie S to Blinka. This included adding some more tools such as a CISFS pin wrapper so that there are more options to add new boards to Blinka. Additionally, she added pulse width modulation support and analog input support to the RockPie S, which is the first time she had added those features. Next up, she will be focusing on improving I2C support of the Raspberry Pi, including adding support for unusual configurations, as well as working on adding I2C to the external BitBang.io circuit Python library. PyCon 2020 online continues with many talks, tutorials, and more already posted. Visit us.pycon.org slash 2020 slash online to find links to all of the currently available content or sign up for the mailing list to receive updates. Talks of note this week include how to build an intelligent indoor garden with microcontrollers circuit Python and IoT, and nine years of Pi ladies lessons learned and what comes next. Find all the available video content on the PyCon US 2020 YouTube channel. The USA Science and Engineering Festival is to offer their popular XSTEM conference in a virtual format. XSTEM All Access is an engaging, entertaining, educational, and interactive online STEM experience for kids. Through a series of daily live stream events, students will hear from an exclusive group of visionaries who aim to empower and inspire kids about careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. XSTEM All Access presentations will be geared towards a middle and high school level audience, grades 6 to 12, but kids and adults of all ages are welcome to join. Educators are encouraged to include XSTEM All Access into their distance learning curriculum. There will be daily presentations on weekdays May 13th to 19th 2020 from 1 to 2 p.m. Eastern time. There is no cost to attend. Register on their website USAScienceFestival.org. EuroPython 2020 this year will be an online conference from July 23rd to 26th including two conference days with keynotes, talks, lightning talks, and poster sessions, and two sprint days with multiple sprint teams. Attending the conference days will require a ticket and participating in the sprints will be free. Check out ep2020.europython.eu for details. PyCon AU has announced they are holding PyCon Line AU in August. Check out 2020.pycon.org.au for more information. PyCon India 2020 the premier conference in India on using and developing the Python programming language will be held online from October 3rd through 5th 2020. A call for proposals is now open through the 14th of August. Visit in.pycon.org slash 2020 for details regarding the CFP and the conference. Looking for more Python on hardware all week? Join the Adafruit community on Discord and check out the Help with Circuit Python on Circuit Python channels. We're over 18,000 strong and continuing to grow. You'll find a supportive positive community filled with like-minded folks. Join at adafru.it slash discord. And that is your Python on hardware news for this week. 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