 It's that time again. This is Katnou with your weekly Python on Hardware News. Every week, we put together the Python for 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 area and beyond. This week, Adafruit spoke to Business Insider about the changes involved with shifting focus to coronavirus crisis relief in a safe and efficient manner, including staggering shifts, using an on-site fever scanner, and wearing masks and gloves. Phil continues to keep the Adafruit factory a clean and safe place for those who are still coming in. Adafruit continues to manufacture face shields and is now prepping them for inclusion in the Adafruit shop. If you're looking to buy Adafruit products in general at this time, consider purchasing from our partner Digikey at digikey.com, or by clicking the Digikey button found on many of our product pages at adafruit.com. If you are looking to place an essential COVID-19 related order, check out the Adafruit Learn System for a guide on placing COVID-19 related orders, or email covid19 at adafruit.com if you have questions specific to making an essential order. April 29, 2020 is MicroPython's 7th birthday. To celebrate, they are asking people to share their MicroPython Pie Board projects. The MicroPython team will pick a winner to receive a Pie Board D-Series circuit board and a runner-up to receive a MicroPython t-shirt. Find all the details on Twitter and Facebook. The MicroPython website recently refreshed their downloads page. Check it out at micropython.org slash download. CircuitPython 5.3.0 release candidate zero was released this week. If there are no major issues found, it will be released as 5.3.0 stable. This release has a number of new features and improvements, including support for RGB matrix display, adding fill to display IO bitmap, improvements to the STM32 and Litex ports, improvements to microlab, and the addition of three new boards. To download it, visit circuitpython.org slash downloads, choose your board, and download the latest unstable release of CircuitPython. All testing and feedback is greatly appreciated. A new port of Cyanobite, the Google Driver Generator to MicroPython, automatically generates I2C drivers in a standardized way. It also supports Raspberry Pi. Author Nick Felker states it shouldn't be too hard to support CircuitPython 2. Code is available on GitHub. Harvard University is offering free online courses including programming. They state that they have 448 courses with 6 million students in 193 countries. The selection includes their CS50 programming classes. Check out CS50's web programming with Python and JavaScript, which is a 12-week long class and build is available now. Visit online-learning.harvard.edu slash catalog to learn more. Hackspace Magazine issue 30 features an article about the new microlab library port to CircuitPython. Microlab is a subset of the Python data crunching library NumPy. An Adafruit Clue board is used to demonstrate the power of fast mathematics on microcontrollers. Download or subscribe at hackspace.rasberrypi.org slash issues. Plastologic of Dresden, Germany has released a new CircuitPython library called PLMicroEPD. This is a library and tools written in CircuitPython for their flexible organic e-ink displays. Code is available on GitHub. You can automate production with Python. CADQuery is a Python-based mechanical design framework with an associated library for the creation of assemblies called CQ Parts. It can be used, for example, in the fabrication of panels for enclosures. The team states they know that other code-based frameworks exist, like OpenSCAD and ImplicitCAD, but they've been using CADQuery because of the following. It's Python, not a new domain-specific language to learn. It has great geometry selection, sort of like CSS, called CADQuery String Selectors. It is built on top of OpenCascade, a powerful solid modeling kernel, and CQ Parts has powerful mating and constraint features, including mates which modify the geometry of the underlying part. Their blog post on crowd supply has additional details. 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. This week, 48 new boards were certified, including the Feather M0 Wi-Fi, the Cricket for Circuit Playground Express, and the Monster Mask. TG Techie posted to Twitter a custom-designed watch using the NRF 52840 on a custom board and running Circuit Python. Thea wrote a blog post about designing the Winterbloom Big Honking Button EuroRack module. The post explores hardware design and discusses the different circuit designs and component selections. Check it out at blog.thea.codes Ryan Walton created a Google Calendar viewer using PyPortal and Circuit Python. Find a detailed write-up on ryantywalton.com slash projects. Tram will post to Twitter an experimental port of MicroPython to the ResMed S10 CPAP bipap machine. Code is available on GitHub. Details are available at airbreak.dev Build a SIM stapler simulator using a stapler, a Circuit Playground Express, and Circuit Python. The distance estimation team at COVIDWatch is using Circuit Python for tests to support their COVID-19 anonymous exposure notification app. This takes advantage of the growing BLE capability in Circuit Python. Team member Dar Scott, who uses Clue in measurements, is also pondering whether Clue or Circuit Playground Bluefruit can join phones in being part of the network of exposure notification apps. Learn more at covid-watch.org. Ferry the Maker built a super-vitaminated game-of-life-inspired project with an Adafruit RGB matrix, a Raspberry Pi, and Python. Code and solder post to Twitter, playing NES on a bigger screen. Now using RetroPi running on a Raspberry Pi. An Adafruit Pi badge running Circuit Python and an HID keyboard program is used as a game controller. Code and solder also posts a write-up about using a Raspberry Pi as an SWD programmer to flash Circuit Python onto a particle xenon board. Check it out at codensolder.com slash blog. Dork Energy shares a GUI interface for Adafruit's command line and Pi utility that allows you to transfer files from your computer to an ESP32 or similar device. Code is written in Python. User 9747 posts code to GitHub enabling you to write your Python code in Malayalam and compile it using their VASA script as well as a VS Code extension. Learn how to develop an extensible web scraper with Python, requests, and BS4 from a blog post on Janowski.dev. Kester Lester posts images of converting a 1927 vintage desk phone into a mobile phone with talk and text using a Pi board and MicroPython. WaspOS provides a simple digital clock application for pine time and access to the MicroPython REPL for interactive testing and tweaking. Code is available on GitHub. 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 Onion Omega 2 Plus. 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 CircuitPython and CircuitPython.org. There was one new Python on hardware-related guide in the Adafruit Learn system this week. Brent posted a Pi Portal Quarantine clock using Circuit Python. It obtains the precise time from the Internet using the Pi Portal's built-in Wi-Fi module, then updates and displays an estimate of the day and time, such as Thursday, mid-morning. The current number of Circuit Python libraries is 226. There is one new library this week, Adafruit Circuit Python Phona, 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, Dan is still working on implementing the Adafruit BLE services needed to talk to the Circuit Playground app. It is mostly done, but there were some changes needed to Circuit Python. After that's done, he'll be looking at using Bleak on a host computer to implement BLEIO under Blinka. As well, he is looking at BLE-capable bathroom scales and blood pressure monitors to communicate with. Jeff released 5.3.0RC0. If you encounter any problems with it, please let us know on Discord, the forums, or on GitHub. Thank you to all who contributed to this new version. It is a community effort. The RGB matrix code, formerly known as ProtoMatter, he's been working on for several weeks as in the new release, and the related guide has been published. We've got pinouts for five different Circuit Python boards and four examples ranging from simple scrolling text to an implementation of John Conway's Game of Life. John Conway's dedication to recreational mathematics was an important element in his own development of love for mathematics and computers. Conway recently passed away. Lucien spent time working on documentation settings and reviews for the Circuit Python STM port, including looking into why the ST dev boards for Circuit Python did not list their supported modules correctly in the support matrix. In the process, he ended up revising a number of flags across the build process, making the process of developing a new port more standard across all of Circuit Python. Melissa focused on moving several repositories still using Travis CI to GitHub actions. One of the things involved in doing that was going through and making sure the code was formatted properly and documented. The hardest library to move over was Blinka because it involved addressing over 800 items that Pilant found. Most of these were making sure all of the files, classes, and public functions were properly documented, but it had code improvement suggestions as well. However, it was completely worth it because now when new code is submitted, it will be checked that it is properly formatted prior to merging in. Python US 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. You can also check out the PyCon US 2020 YouTube channel to find video content. 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 that 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 and Circuit Python channels, where 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. Visit adafruitdaily.com to subscribe to the newsletter or tune in again next week.