CircuitPython Weekly Meeting for August 10th, 2026 @circuitpython #circuitpython #adafruit

Hello everyone. This is the Circuit Python weekly meeting for August 10th, 2026. Uh yeah, 2026. This is a time of the week where we get together to talk about all things Circuit Python. Uh my name is Tim and I am sponsored by Adafruit to work on Circuit Python. Circuit Python is a version of Python that is designed to run on tiny computers called microcontrollers. Circuit Python development is primarily sponsored by Adafruit. So if you want to help support Adafruit and CircuitPython consider purchasing hardware from them at their website adap.com. This meeting gets hosted on the Adafruit Discord, you can join anytime by going to adafr.it/isord. We hold the meeting in the CircuitPython dev text channel as well as the Circuit Python voice channel there on Discord. The meeting typically happens on Mondays at 2 p.m. US Eastern time, 11:00 a.m. US Pacific time, except when that coincides with the US holiday. Uh in the notes dock there is a link to a calendar uh which you can view online or add to your favorite calendar app. Um we also send notifications about upcoming meetings via discord. So if you'd like to receive notifications about any changes to the day or time uh or the reminder uh on the day of uh the meeting you can ask to be added to the circuit pythonista's role on discord. Uh there is a notes uh document shared notes document a Google doc that accompanies the meeting and recording. You can contribute to the document beforehand. Uh the final notes document will include timestamps uh so that you can skip around as you view the uh recorded video. Uh meeting tends to run uh 30 to 60 minutes is what we say here. Although uh in the uh middle of the summer here with fewer people uh often times they'll run a bit quicker than that even since we do some round robin sections. Um we will post up the new notes dock for the next week's meeting uh following the current one and uh link that here on the discord. So you can always check the pinned messages in the Circuit Python dev channel throughout the week in order to find the notes dock for the upcoming meeting and uh you are certainly uh more than welcome to leave hug reports and status updates in that doc throughout the week as well. You don't have to wait until Monday to fill those out. Um the meeting structure uh as usual gets held in five parts. The first part will be community news. A look at all things Circuit Python and Python on hardware in the community. Uh we will review a couple of items that I grabbed out of the wonderful newsletter, Python and microcontrollers newsletter from today. Then we'll get into the state of Circuit Python the libraries in Blinka. That one is a quantitative overview of the entire entire project. Chance to look at the project by the numbers separate from our status updates. Then we will start our roundrobin sections. We have hug reports section is the first one. This is an opportunity to highlight good things folks are doing. We can take a moment to recognize awesome folks in our community and beyond. Uh then we have uh the next round robin status updates. This one is an opportunity to report what we've been up to. Uh we will uh go down the list again, take a moment to talk about what we've been up to in the past week and uh what we'll be working on over the next week. And then uh lastly uh fifth and final part is in the weeds of the meeting. Uh this is an opportunity for more long- form discussions. Those can be items that came out of status updates or they can be identified ahead of time as uh topics that we want to uh go into a more in-depth discussion on and added uh as such. Uh so that covers how the meeting will go. First up, we'll get into community news. I'll start taking some uh timestamps here. Let's do this one. So, first up, uh, in community news, I'll tell you, uh, more about the newsletter, uh, generally at the end, but first up, uh, item that caught my eye from the newsletter this week was the Defcon 34 badge, uh, packs a surprise. Uh, Andrew Bunny Huang's uh, mostly open Bow Chip X1. Uh, attendees at Defcon 34 conference, which is, uh, either ongoing or perhaps was over this past weekend, I think, uh, out there in Las Vegas, are going to find something very special on their badge. uh Andrew Bunny Hang's Bow Chip X1, a quote mostly open end quote chip. Uh there are 27,000 badges uh which will include the bow and a removable camera module uh will get distributed at the event uh with the MicroPython port above. This is mentioning uh above actually in the newsletter. So you'll have to check out the uh newsletter that got mailed out to you to see the MicroPython port. That's another wonderful item uh from this week's newsletter. So uh just noting that here. U because of that MicroPython port which was also mentioned uh it will uh presumably be possible to run MicroPython on the Defvcon badge which is very cool. The uh the bow chip got a MicroPython port as well. So you can find that one in the newsletter too. Uh next up we have Circuit Python day has been announced for August the 21st um 2026. It's that time of the year. Adafruit has determined that August 21st, 2026 is the snakiest day of the year and designated it circuit python day. Uh Adafruit will have special uh special shows and more throughout the day. You can tag projects with #circuityonday 2026 on social media and Adafruit will look to highlight them. Uh you can also check out a post which is linked here on the Adafruit blog which has a uh tentative schedule with uh live streams and other uh programming and I believe we'll update that as time goes if more stuff gets added. Uh next up from the newsletter uh this week was uh VTOS a terminalbased hobby firmware. Uh VOSS turns a LIGO TDC into a pocket-sized hackable terminal computer. It's written in MicroPython. It boots into a built-in shell stocked with retro and modern network clients. There are links here to GitHub and YouTube for this project. Uh I will have to check out the video later, but I was looking in the newsletter and reading about this this morning and saw some of the uh screenshots and GIFs and stuff. And this looks like a really cool uh little device. Very much hearkens back to the uh QBasic editor in my mind um which has a sweet spot in my heart. So very cool project. They'll definitely be checking this one out. VTOS is what that is. Um, next up is, let me take a time stamp. Using I2C devices with your computer's browser, uh, using Web Blinka. Web Blinka allows you to control I2C hardware from the browser using real circuit Python drivers plus a uh, plus an MCP uh, 2221 or MCP221A uh, connected to the computer. Um, click connect to grant access and then Adafruits, Blinka and Circuit Python libraries run unmodified in a Python runtime inside the web page and talk to the chip over web hid. There is uh no server, nothing to install beyond the browser. Uh, and there are links here to Blue Sky, uh, a web page and to GitHub if you would like to learn more about this. And this one caught my eye this week because I saw I think is it maybe piodide or something like that. There's a few of these, I think, um, Python runtimes that work inside of the browser. Uh, I think backed by JavaScript if I'm, um, not mistaken, although I haven't looked too close into them. Uh, they've have popped up a few times and I've wondered if there's any sort of crossover uh, between our world and theirs. Wondered what would be possible, but have never uh, really made the leap myself to look into it. So this is really cool to see that someone has uh brought Blinka and the Circuit Python driver libraries uh to be able to run inside of a browser session. So you can uh interact with a device uh live right there um connected to your computer uh with no extra install uh and setup and stuff which is very very cool stuff. Um, okay. So, all of these items came out of the Python on microcontrollers newsletter, uh, which is a circuit Python communityrun newsletter that gets emailed every Monday. The complete archives are available online at adafruitdaily.com. Uh, it highlights the latest on Python uh, the latest Python on hardware related news from around the web including circuit python, python and microython developments. Uh you can also contribute your own news or projects by emailing cpnewsatafruit.com. Uh we always appreciate contributions from the community for new uh newsletter items. All right, next up and uh as always we will give a hug report here to an thanks uh to an for curating uh the great set of stuff that we get to pour over each week in the newsletter. Uh and with that I will bring it down to the state of circuit python the libraries and blinka. Let me take a time code for that and then I'll tell you what this one is. This is a quantitative overview of the entire project. Uh it'll give us a chance to look at the health of the project separate from our status update. We'll talk about the project overall and then separately discuss the core the libraries and blinka to check in on some stats. So, first up, I will tell you uh about the overall stats here. There we are. So, we had uh over the past week uh 17 pull requests merged by eight different authors. A couple of names that were newer or less frequent um to my eye, less recognized, at least to my eye, and I didn't do this ahead of time, so I'm uh quickly doing it here as I stall uh those names this week. So again, these might be folks that are um newer contributors or just less frequent contributors, or it may just be the case that I uh don't happen to recognize their name uh from these lists uh as frequently. So those names this week are uh Whiz, Hannah, um Danny 1, and Freyer 86. So thanks to those folks as well as our other authors uh including Relic SC, Dan, Scott, and myself. Uh we had three reviewers this week. Thanks to Scott, Dan, and myself. And issues wise, we had nine closed issues by four different people. Three new issues opened up by three people. Uh leaving us net uh would be uh up uh or excuse me, down by six there actually. Yeah. Um next up, I will pass it over to Dan if you're available to tell us about the core. Although if not, that's no problem. I can read as well. >> Sure. Can you hear me? >> Yes. Yep. >> Good. Okay. So, uh, in the core, there were 15 poll requests merged in the past week, which is impressive, uh, by seven authors. Um, Whiz, Hannah, and Danny one are, uh, new or real or possibly relatively new. Uh, and there were three reviewers of those poll requests. There are now 14 open poll requests. I closed one or two that were really old and were not um were kind of on hold or not making progress and they could be reopened if necessary. Uh the old ones that are still there are sort of like they could go at any time and uh so I don't necessarily want to close them right away. There were seven issues closed by two people and one issue opened by one person. There are now 759 open issues. Uh there are eight active milestones. Uh the milestones are the way we keep track of what needs to be done sooner rather than later or what time sooner or later. Um there are no open issues on the 10.2.x branch. There are 15 open issues for 10.3.0. Um there are 40 issues open on 10.x.x. Then there are 14 issues open on the 11 milestone. Those are things that we've deferred probably because uh they may be incompatible or there's something that we want to do in the next major version. So, and then there are 661 open issues uh that are long-term. So, those are not necessarily going to be fixed soon, but uh we want to keep that for there for prosperity. And we're up to date on triage. There are no issues that are not assigned a milestone. And that's it for the core. >> All right. Thank you, Dan. Next up, I will tell you about the Circuit Python libraries. Uh, all of these libraries are hosted on GitHub. They are under two main uh library bundles. We have the Adafruit library bundle with um 396 libraries in it currently. in the community library bundle with 180 libraries in that one for a total of 576 different libraries that support various uh drivers for uh different pieces of hardware or uh helper libraries to allow you to work uh on Circuit Python projects at a bit of a higher level uh than you otherwise would. um across the Adafruit Library bundle. This week we had two pull requests merged by two different authors thanks to uh Freyer uh 86 again as a new uh newer or less frequent contributor uh this week in library land. Uh we had two reviewers thanks to Scott and myself and then of the merged poll requests. Uh everything was brand new this week. Uh two uh pull requests were only one day old. Um and that is what we got to this week. Uh that leaves us with 41 poor requests that remain open. The oldest one of those is a draft that's up to uh 1,453 days and the newest one is 3 days old at the time of these stats. Issues wise uh for libraries uh in the Adafruit bundle, there were two issues closed by two people, one new issue opened up by one person, leaving us with 777 open issues currently. And there are two of those right now that are labeled as good first issues. Uh you could find those as well as the others over at circuit python.org/contributing which is a website where you should head if you are interested in contributing to circuit python on the Python side of things. Uh when you first load that page circuity.org/contributing you'll find a list of open PRs and open issues. Uh this is a good place to start if you're interested in reviewing. You can check out that list of open PRs. Um click through to GitHub, take a look at the code. Uh if you have the hardware, you can uh test it out on hardware. Um, but either way, you can look over the code for syntax, spelling, uh, logic, anything like that, and leave a comment on GitHub letting us know what you found. Uh, what you found when you looked over the code, um, if you did have hardware and you're able to test it out, let us know how that went as well and include information about what versions and what, uh, specific hardware you used and all that good stuff. Um, if you get comfortable with that process, you like to get leveled up to join the review team that we have on GitHub, which will get you some uh additional notifications of things as they pop up that uh are in need of review. We can work with you to add you to that. Uh, if you would like to start submitting some changes of your own, you can also do that from the same page. If you click over to the issues tab, uh, and then scroll through that list, uh, you can click through to GitHub to find, uh, issues that you can work on. This could be a a bug, a fix, uh or rather a bug that someone has reported that is in need of a fix. Uh or it could be adding a new feature enhancement or example or something like that to a library. Uh we do have a learn guide for contributing to Circuit Python using Git and GitHub. Uh and we also always have folks who are around here on the Discord who are happy to help you get started out. So, uh, if you would like to help contributing, whether that's reviewing, uh, open PRs or, uh, submitting some of your own PRs to resolve issues or just to work on something that, uh, interests you, then, uh, we encourage you to come say hi on the Discord. Uh, if you're having any trouble, let us know, uh, what uh, issue you're having. There will be somebody there who is happy to help you out. Uh, we want everyone to be able to contribute in whatever way works best for them. Um, and then I will leave you uh with the uh new libraries of the week. Over in the community bundle, we had a new library for the M5 paper uh EPD. So, a E in driver I believe is what that one is. Uh, and then next up, I will tell you about uh Blinka. So, Blinka is the compatibility layer. Uh this allows Circuit Python libraries like all the ones mentioned above to work on single board computers like the Raspberry Pi 5 and similar devices. Uh it was a quiet week in Blinko land this week. No pull requests merged uh by no authors and there are 14 pull requests that remain open uh ranging from oldest one being uh let's say 726 although uh it is a bit of an outlier. They drop off quite rapidly after that. And the newest one is down at uh two days right now for uh open pull requests and I believe a number of these are still uh dependabot updates which I keep meaning to roll through as I read them but then promptly forget uh after the meeting. So I will try to remember to do that as well this week. Uh but that is it for the Blinka stats. So with that, I will kick off the hug reports section. As a reminder, hug reports is a chance to highlight folks in the Circuit Python community and beyond for doing awesome things. I'll start us off and then we'll go down the list uh of hug reports as they appear in the dock here uh alphabetically. Uh if you are not present then uh I'll read your notes for you. Otherwise, I'll call on you and you can take a minute to read off your hug reports. Uh so for me, I'll take a time stamp here. for me. Hug report uh goes to JP this week. Thanks for reviewing my guide for the uh teenage engineering ting. Really appreciate having an extra set of eyes there. Uh and then I will pass it over to uh Dan next. >> All right. So, thanks to uh Smidka, Lince Smittka uh who works on uh Picoame, which we've been hearing a lot about, who's also been working on some slightly more general graphics performance uh considerations and has a PR in to circuit Python. Thanks to Scott who uh got a bunch of um Zapper BL stuff um working and there's a PR that was merged. And thanks to Brent who gave me some hints on how to use Claude uh more effectively in various ways. That was very helpful. And that's it for me. >> All right. Thank you, Dan. Uh next up, I will take a time stamp and read notes for Toddbot. Toddbot has a hug report for me uh for the EP 2350 TING work. Uh Toddbot says, "Very cool." Uh which I say thank you to that. Yes, I definitely had a lot of fun uh working on it. So, I'm glad folks uh like that as well. Um, and that is it for hug reports. So, next up, I will take the time stamp for status updates and tell you about that. Uh, status updates is our time to tell folks what we're up to individually. And again, I'll start, then we'll go down the list uh as they appear in the notes dock. And when I call on you this time, you can take a couple moments to tell us what you've been up to since the last meeting and what you'll be doing until the next meeting. Um, and as always, if we have uh conversations that become too large, we can always bounce those down to in the weeds. Uh, so I will kick us off with a time stamp. Uh, last week the, uh, EP2350 guide was published as mentioned. Uh, and then I turned my attention towards a couple of, uh, audio things in the core. So, one of them was a flanger effect. I submitted that to the core and that's merged now uh after a bit of uh reworking during review. Uh thanks to the folks who reviewed that as well, I should say a belated hug reports to um Toddbot and Relic SE for that as well as Scott. Um also in the core in audio land uh this past week I submitted a PR to remove the invert bit clock argument for I2SN. So I2SN supports relatively new. This was an argument that was on there that I added during development. And it turns out that I was uh kind of mistaken about what was needed for the codec that I had. Um, and this was in fact not needed. And I looked around a bit and I think like it's theoretically possible a codec could exist that needs this or that could at least maybe be configured to need this. Um, but it didn't seem like it was very common. So, uh, we got rid of that and if it pops up again, we can always, um, add it back or look into a different way to handle it. But, uh, for now, we were able to clean that up a bit some, which is cool. Uh, and then, uh, after that, I have started looking into a different Teenage Engineering device. This one uses a NRF 52840 as its main brain. Uh, and I have been, uh, investigating the bootloadader on that device and how the power off and reset mechanisms work. Um and I have started making a circuit python board defaf um which will manage the watchdog and will um kind of allow the reset and power off to work which is a little bit weird on this device because of how uh the hardware is set up. So um I've been doing uh a bunch of the development using the uh the glasses driver, the LED glasses driver um because that actually is a a good standin. It has the same main chip. It has a a similar um crystal going for its uh timekeeping. Um and it uh very importantly it has very easy to access um through hhole soldered uh SWD pins. So I have that all hooked up to my Raspberry Pi and I'm able to iterate very quickly and um if I lock it up, it's easy to recover as compared to the uh the actual target device. So I'm getting close to the point where I'm uh about ready to actually try it on the real device, but I'm still working through stuff on this one. uh where it's a bit safer. Uh so with that, I will pass it over to Dan next. All right, so uh a bunch of fixes for 1030. I did certify 1030. I fixed an MDNS crash. Um I improved the error messages that you get back when you use an SSL certificate and it doesn't work. This is particularly helpful if you're trying to use like self-signed certificates or or something like that or your own private certificates. Um, and the information was there, it just we weren't printing it. Um, I'm updating uh u um which was our version was pretty old, but there's uh some various problems that I have to fix on the Ulab side before we can do that update. So, I've submitted several PRs to Ulab and I'm talking to the maintainer as well. Um, I fixed a minor fix on Nordic. Uh, we were accidentally not supporting two stop bits on UART. It just there wasn't implemented properly. It was that was a really easy fix. Um, another thing that I did is that we used to do these trial window builds on every uh continuous integration run of Circuit Python. And the idea of this was to see if you could build Circuit Py the Circuit Python build worked under Windows um, MSYS, which is kind of a SIGUIN MSYS 2, which is kind of a SIGUIN kind of thing. Or maybe it's MGW. I can't remember. I think we use both of those kind of pix invitations that are on Windows and this was done like six years ago. Uh so we could do some builds on Windows. We never documented how to do builds on Windows. It started to bit rot recently because of some version problems and we don't really want to maintain that. Um it's not worth it. If you have Windows, you can always use WSL, Windows subs system for Linux, which is a sort of a Windows a Linux VM that you can run inside Windows. So, we recommend that and that is documented in the building circuit Python guide. So, this way we'll just save 20 minutes of CP of uh time on each CI build. It's done in parallel, but it was always done. So, that's turned off. And uh I've spent several days uh debugging uh the BLE workflow. Um this worked before but not that well. Um and lately was only working on Mac OS. I was trying to figure out what was wrong, why I wasn't working on Windows, why working on Linux. And I enlisted Claude Code to help me. We did a lot of testing and um the results were very odd and they kept sort of changing out from under us. And um when I say us, I don't really mean to anthropomorphize Claude, but it's easier to talk that way. Uh so it turned out something that I noticed is that we got different results after the computer had gone to sleep whereas instead of it was from a fresh boot. And it turns out that indeed the behavior of the BLE controller that's on my motherboard was different before and after a sleep a suspend. This was very confusing and aha. And we tried some other BE adapters like I had some plug-in ones that go into USB and they worked much better. So it seems that this is just a hardware problem or hard it's not a hardware problem because it actually works under Windows. But um it's some issue with maybe the drivers for this particular chip and maybe some flakiness about this particular chip that's handled in the Windows drivers and that research is still going on. But uh it means that it's the the bug is it's not really our bug, but it's something that people will have to watch out for and I'll document this as needed. And uh so that's been an interesting experience. I went to Micros Microenter this morning and bought a couple more Bluetooth adapters. So that's it for me. All right, thank you Dan. And that is it for status updates as well. Uh next up would be in the weeds. Uh if we had any topics here, this would be a chance to discuss them. A reminder that could be longer form stuff or uh stuff that needs a bit of a back and forth. This week we don't have anything, so we will scooch right on past to the wrap-up. Uh, and I will go through there once I get scrolled through it. Yes, there we are. Um, so yeah, a reminder, this has been the Circuit Python weekly meeting for August 10th, 2026. Thanks to everyone who participated. Uh, if you'd like to help support Adafruit and Circuit Python and those of us that work on Circuit Python, consider purchasing hardware from the Adafruit shop at Adafruit.com. The video of this meeting will get released on YouTube at youtube.com/adafruit and the podcast will be made available on major podcast services. Uh it will also get featured in the Python for microcontrollers newsletter. You can visit adafruit.com in order to subscribe to that. Um the next meeting will be held next Monday at the usual time 2 p.m. Eastern 11:00 a.m. Pacific. That is on the 17th of uh August next week on Monday. Um the meeting as always is held on the Adafruit Discord which you can join anytime at adafru.it/isord. If you'd like to be notified about the meeting and any changes to the day or time, you can ask to be added to the circuit pythonistas role on the discord. Uh so that is it for this week. Uh we hope to see you all next week and thanks again everyone.