CircuitPython Weekly Meeting for August 24, 2026 @circuitpython #circuitpython #adafruit

Hello everyone. This is Circuit Python weekly meeting for Monday, August 24th, 2026. It's time of the week where we get to talk about all things Circuit Python. I am Liz and I'm sponsored by Adafruit to work on Circuit Python. Circuit Python is a version of Python designed to run on tiny computers called microcontrollers. Circuit Python development primarily sponsored by Adafruit. So if you want to support Adafruit and Circuit Python, consider purchasing hardware from Adafruit.com. Meeting is hosted on the Adafruit Discord server. You can join anytime by going to Adafruit.it/isord. We hold the meeting in the CircaPython dev text channel and the CircaPython voice channel. This meeting typically happens on Mondays at 2:00 p.m. US Eastern, 11:00 a.m. Pacific, except when it coincides with US holiday. In the notes doc, there's a link to a calendar you can view online or add to your favorite calendar app. We also send notifications about upcoming meetings via Discord. If you want to receive those notifications, ask us to add you to Circa Python Nista's Discord role. There's a shared notes document that accompanies the meeting and recording. You can contribute to this document beforehand. File notes document includes timestamps to go along with the video, so you can use the dot to skip around and view parts of the video that interests you most. Meeting tends to run 30 to 60 minutes. After each meeting, we post a link to next meeting's notes document in the Circuit Python dis circuity dev channel on Adafruit Discord. check pins messages to find notes doc um and so you can add your notes for following meeting. If you wish to participate but cannot attend, you can leave hug reports as updates in the document for us to read during the meeting. And that meeting is held in five parts. First part is community news. Second part stay circuit python libraries in blinka, third part hugger reports, fourth part status updates and the fifth part is in the weeds. And with that we will get started with community news and big milestone for community news celebrating 400 newsletters. First started on November 15th 2016. Python and microcontrollers newsletter has been published for nearly 10 years and has reached 400 issues. We could not have done this without the fabulous worldwide community of Python programmers who work tirelessly and share the results with everyone else. Thank you. Check out the archive over at Adafruit Daily and thank you Ann for doing the newsletter. And then uh Circ Python Day 2026 wrap-up. Circyon Day 2026 last Friday was fabulous. Talks were great and makers debuted some new Circuit Python content. Catch the YouTube playlist of talks given if you missed anything. And then that links over to YouTube. You can catch up with everything that happened on Friday. And then Circapyon on the new bow chip. New bow microcontroller from Andrew Bunny Wong has a new circython port and Adafruit's Phil Terrone has been doing some realworld kicking the tires. No blinks in LED. The bow and circon is doing realworld work in a number of examples. GPIO bitbang 92 kHz from Python. PWM hitting 100 hertz to 100 kHz exactly. ADC dat stats 3000 soft sin and div in 379 milliseconds. No FPU generative ASI art seated from the factory UID different on every bow chip identical on yours best look what this is live ADC bar graph at 20 FPS and the sound generation is fantastic and there's a nice YouTube link if you're interested in seeing some of that visualized and these news items and more are available in our weekly Python for microcontrollers newsletter which goes out via email on Monday mornings visit adfordaily.com to subscribe to newsletter thanks to Ann for put newsletter together. If you have any Python on hardware or projects to share or find content you'd like to see included, please consider contributing to the newsletter. Email cpnews at adafruit.com with a link to content. And here's to 400 more issues. Uh but that is community news. Next up is state of circa python libraries and blinka. This is a quantitative overview of the entire project. Gives us a chance to look at the health of the project separate from our status updates. We'll talk about the project overall, then separately discuss the core, libraries, and Blinka. So, first up, overall, there were 23 poll requests merged by 11 authors that included Toddbot, Mikeyclar, Fomoyu, Bablock B, Jeepler, GR, Grant, Relic, Tekric, Tan, and Dan Halpert. There were four reviewers, Foamy Guy, myself, Blitz City, Tan, and Dan Halbert. and then 10 closed issues by four people, five opened by four people. And now we'll hear from Scott about the core. >> Hello. Let me pull up the doc. So for the core, uh we had 15 poll requests merged from eight different authors. Um, some infrequent contributors are Mikey Sclar, Badlock B, Relic, Essie, Tektric. Um, so thank you to those folks. Um, we had two reviewers, Dan and myself. And I'd just like to say I do feel like uh we're hitting this uh the LLM world of of changes to Circuit Python, which is awesome. I just opened like another maybe 15 tabs of reviews to look at. Um, but I I I would again do a call for reviewers. So, if you feel like you uh had done a couple uh changes to the core and feel comfortable taking a look at stuff and reviewing it, that would be awesome. Um, so let me know if you you'd like to become a reviewer for the core. Um, I'm sure Tim will talk about that. We're always looking for library reviewers as well. Um, so stats for the core, we had 30 open poll requests. So again, we're over we tend to have this goal of being under 25, which puts us on a single page. Um, again, this is all good that we have lots of stuff coming in. U, we'll just need to do more reviews. Um, we had two closed issues. Uh, so that's what I'll say for poll requests. Issues wise, we had two closed issues by two people, four opened by three people. So we're net up to for a total of 764 open issues. I suspect that a lot of these issues are um these poll requests are for closing issues. I will also let let me say one more thing about the poll requests is that as we enter this LLM world like it's way more important that poll requests are small. um if they have multiple things going on them at once, it means that the stuff that's uh good can't be merged in until the stuff that's that needs another pass on can be. So, um I do like so we should aim to have lots of small pull requests so that the ones that look good can get merged in while the ones that need some more work can be worked on separately. Okay. Um issues. Going back to issues, we use milestones to um categorize or prioritize for us Adafruit funded folks. Um again, 10.2 has no open issues. That's been our stable release for a long while. We have 13 open issues on 10.3, but I suspect a lot of those we will not wait for. Um I think we want to do 103 soon, like this week. Um, and then I'd just like to say that long-term, some folks may see long-term as issues, and this is means that it's not a priority for a group funded folks. Uh, we currently have 663 of those. But though, that doesn't mean that we're not willing to help you, meaning like give you pointers on what where the code could be, do your review, that sort of thing. Um, so if you have if you find an issue, you file it and we mark it as longterm. It just means that that's not something we're going to pick up immediately. Um, and if you want to work on it, we're still happy to help you do that. Uh, and then last up, we have zero issues not assigned to milestones. So this means that we are keeping up with the triage. And that's it for the core. >> Awesome. Thank you. And now we'll hear from Tim about the libraries. >> All right. Thank you, Liz. Uh this section does cover all of the circuit python libraries which are hosted on GitHub under two different uh library bundles. We have the Adafruit library bundle which has 396 libraries in it currently uh getting quite close to 400. Uh and then we have the community library bundle which is up to 182 libraries right now for a total of 578 different libraries that support various uh pieces of hardware or helper code uh behavior on circuit Python devices. Um over the past week we had eight pull requests merged by four different authors uh thanks to Bob G uh Toddbot Relic IC and uh Jeeper. Um shout out to uh Jeepller hug report. Always nice to see uh his name pop up. We had uh four reviewers. Thanks to Liz, Scott, Dan, and myself for reviews in the libraries this week. Of the poll requests that were merged, the uh oldest one was 20 days old, and the newest uh handful, we're down at 1 day old. Uh which leaves us right now with 40 uh pull requests open across the Adafruit bundle libraries. The oldest one of those is a draft that is at 1467 days. The newest one is brand new at one day. Uh and then issues-wise over the past week we had eight eight issues closed by four people and one new issue opened up by one person. So net down uh some issues there on libraries and that leaves us with uh 772 issues uh that are open uh currently and uh I will say here uh uh u early uh hug report to Bob G for closing out some of these issues in the library land. Uh very much appreciated. Um there are two of the issues that remain that are labeled as good first issues. You can find those over at circuit python.org/contributing. Uh when you first load that page, you will see a list of the open uh pull requests, which is where you can uh start out with some reviewing like uh like Scott mentioned, although this is reviewing uh in the Circuit Python libraries. Uh so it it it is uh a bit less in-depth than the uh the core like Scott mentioned. This is a great place to part to start I should say. And this uh is what we tend to point folks towards if they want to get involved but they don't have a specific thing that they know they want to work on, right? If you uh if you have something specific you want to work on, jump in and do that. Uh but if you just know you want to help out or get involved, uh then reviewing PRs is a good place to do it. The process is basically load that page circuity.org/contributing. uh take a spin through the uh links in there. Find uh a uh a uh a link over to GitHub for a driver that is uh a piece of hardware that you have access to or you have some interest in or maybe a helper library that you've used in the past or that you know uh a little bit about. You can click through to GitHub, read up on what the proposed change is and then uh leave a comment on GitHub letting us know how it went. Uh you can look over the code for things like spelling, syntax, logic, all of that sort of stuff. If you do have the hardware, you can test it out on there and then in your comment, let us know how it went. Uh, if you would like to join the review team that we have over on GitHub, so you get a couple more uh notifications and easy access to find these things. We can work with you to add you to that. If you like to start submitting some of your own changes, you can uh facilitate that from the same page on the contributing page. If you click over to the issues tab, uh you will get a similar looking list of links to GitHub, but these ones represent issues. They don't have a proposed change yet, so they're not ready for a review. they need a person to actually come along and uh code up the change and submit the PR and that could be you again if you want to get involved. Uh we do have learn guides for contributing to Circuit Python using Git and GitHub. We also have folks who are more than happy to help you get spun up here on the discord. Uh so if you are trying to get involved and you're having trouble with any part of the process uh reviewing or submitting your own PRs uh with the uh actions or pre-commit or anything else uh just come say hi on the Discord. let us know what you're up to, what kind of issue you're having. Uh, somebody will be happy to help you out. And then, uh, I will leave you with the updates, uh, new libraries in the last 7 days over in the community bundle. This week, we have a menu manager, uh, by Relic SC and some, uh, synth tools by, uh, Toddbot. So, very cool stuff there. And that's what we've got for libraries. >> Great. Thank you. Now, I will read about Blinka. Blinka is our compatibility layer for circuit Python code on single board computers like Raspberry Pi. And this week there were zero pull requests merged. Uh there are currently 15 open pull requests. There were no issues closed and no new issues either. There are currently 79 open issues and the number of supported boards stands at 174. And that is state of circuityon libraries and blinka. Next up is hug reports. Hug reports is a chance to highlight folks in the Circuit Python community and beyond for doing awesome things. I'll start and then we'll go down the list of hug reports alphabetically. If you're text only or are missing the meeting, I will read your notes when I get to them in the list. So, I will kick things off with a group hug to everyone who participated in Circuit Python day on Friday. All the sessions were really great. So, whether you did a session, I really appreciate working with you to get that going or if you moved your regularly scheduled live stream to Friday, really appreciate it. uh everyone who did stuff on the back end too, making sure the blog was updated, checking links, artwork, all that. Really appreciate all of you. I think it's a really great community group effort. So, thank you. And now we will hear from Bob G. >> Thanks, Liz. Um so, uh first of all, thank you for testing and merging the uh um the SCD4X enhancements. Um I appreciate that jumping on that. And uh I also appreciate Tan new for helping me iterate through um Adafruit registers memory footprint and get get it all into a shared uh buffer. And so um thank you. Thank you both. >> Great. Thank you. That was really good timing because the new sensor had come out so I was testing it. Uh and now we'll hear from Dan H. >> Okay. Thanks to you, Liz, for organizing doing the general organization of Circuit Python Day and doing all the video uh session hosting. That was worked out great. Um thanks to uh Tim and Scott for the session that we did on Circuit Python day. The three of us did a what's new in Circuit Python 1030 session that went really well. And then also that day, I think it was the same day, uh, Scott and I had a good discussion about making LLM aided pull requests be better, which is just what we we just talked about earlier about how it's better to have them be smaller and less verbose and direction. That's it for me. >> Great. Thank you. And now we'll hear from foamy guy. >> All right, hug report to you, Liz. thanks for coordinating uh the Circuit Python streams uh echoing what Dan said as well as all of the other work that you put in uh behind the scenes to make the day awesome. Uh thanks as well uh for Circuit Python day streams to uh Relic IC for the audio stream and Todd and Paul for the live uh bootloadader. I enjoyed uh both of those as well. It's really nice to see um the community coordination as well on Circuit Python day. So uh thanks to everyone all around. That's what I've got. >> Thank you. I agree. Those were really great sessions. And now we'll hear from Mikey Sclar. >> Right. Uh, thank you for Circuit Python Day. That was great. Um, I want to also thank Scott for his patience last week when I was in jury duty and he took many of my PRs for the SIWX917 chip that's being brought up. And Dan helped with that as well doing a few PRs which uh, I really needed last week. So, thank you. >> Great. Thank you. And now I'll read for Paul Cutler who's text only. Uh big hug to Liz uh for all our work organizing Circuit Python day. All the live streams are great. Thank you Paul and thank you for doing your session as well. And now we'll hear from Scott. >> Hello. Uh once again thank you to to you Liz for organizing and hosting Circuit Python Day. I know we've all echoed it but is it's a lot of work and it went really well. So thank you for doing that. Uh thanks to also everybody else who participated in Circuit Python Day, all the folks that I saw lots of folks in the chats for all the different streams which was really fun. Um and then uh yeah lastly a hug for Paul um who had me on the Circython show. Um so thanks to Paul for doing Circuit Python show and having me. Um you can it it came out today. We recorded it a few weeks ago. Uh so check that out if you're interested too. >> Awesome. I listened this morning. It was a good episode. All right, thanks everyone. And now we'll move on to status updates. Status updates is our time to tell folks what we're up to individually. I will start and we'll go through a list of updates alphabetically. My call on you, take a couple minutes, talk about what you've been doing since the last meeting and what you'll be doing until the next meeting. If the discussion becomes too long for SAS updates, we can move it to in the weeds. Uh, and I will start. So, as mentioned last week, I worked on prepping for circuit Python day. Uh, I think today was a huge success. So, I'm very grateful for everyone who participated or helped in any way. Uh, this week I'm documenting the new GP843 DAC that was added to the shop and porting the Monster Eyes code to new display and chip combos. Uh, previously it was hardcoded to Sammy 51/M4 on the Hallowing and Monster Mask boards. Code I'm working on will hopefully allow for multiple platforms and displays. right now tested with Pico DBI and the round GC9A01A displays. Uh so the goal is basically instead of having it tied down to one chipset just to make it more portable and easier to add new platforms as they come out in Arduino. Uh there is an aspect of circuit python though I'm using the file system so people can dra drag and drop their eye graphics onto the circuit pie drive then load the Arduino firmware and it will grab it from there. Um, so that's what I'll be working on this week. And now we'll hear from Dan. >> Okay. So, I've been working for the past couple of weeks on a lot of B workflow issues. Uh, greatly aided by LLMs because BL B is complicated and uh there are a lot of problems. Uh, well, different operating systems do things differently, I would say. So, uh, I've got a PR I've got several PRs in to fix some things in Circuit Python to make it work better and be more robust. And also, there are several repos that drive the code.scircuitython.org library, and I've got changes into those. And there are going to be a few more of those as well. And that's it for me. >> Awesome. Thank you. And now we'll hear from Foamy Guy. >> All right. Thanks, Liz. I uh on Circuit Python day in the evening, I did the game jam stream and um I just wanted to pop in here to let folks know I'll continue development on that game. So, if you are interested in it, you want to see where it goes uh over the next couple weekends over on my channel. I'll work on that. Uh I will say uh belated uh Hug Report uh as well, another one out to Smeika who made a Pico game and uh I had a fun time working on it, especially um the uh the agent skill. It was nice to develop a game that way, which I haven't done before. Uh so if folks are interested in Picoame and um want to try out uh making games of your own, uh iterate real quickly, there's a skill out there that makes it uh super easy to uh to work on and iterate your game. So very cool stuff there. Uh and then back into uh this week, what I'm working on is the uh support for Teenage Engineering SP1 device for Circuit Python. Uh I last week refactored a bit based on feedback in the PR to move uh watchdog and the power off button handling uh into board specific directory. Uh and then this week uh this morning I should say I started working on um generalizing the eMMC support to make a new eMMC IO uh module. Uh so there'll be a new module for that and then the first device here the SP1 um hooks up to the chip that is on uh this device and mounts it uh as SD. So you can copy files on and off. Uh and that is what I'm up to. >> Great. Thank you. And now we'll hear from Scott. >> Hello. So I am wrapping up the enabling of Zephyr Beleely workflow. So this will allow us to use the BE workflow with Zephr supported boards, anything that has BE. Um, I'm also finishing up the uh the Zephr Blee adapter has a name and that name is often used in um in advertisements and we were it was just set to Zephyr. We weren't setting it to our like Circuit Python MAC address thing that we did on other ports. So I fixed that on Zephyr and then also I'm splitting it out so that the like figuring out what the name is is shared amongst all of the ports. So I want to get those two things out for PR today. And then next up is uh creating a Zephyr based UF2 bootloadader. Um we have a few different UF2 bootloadaders that we do. Um and I wanted to have one that matched up that was based on Zephyr so that um whenever we have a Circuit Python Zephyr board um we can also have a Zephyr UF2 bootloader to go with it. Um, the way Zephr currently works is it has just like they have this command west that knows how to flash, but the flashing happens in all these different ways. Um, so I'd like to get us to the point where you can you have to do the complicated flashing this vendor specific thing once for for a UF2 bootloader and then from then on um you can just do UF2s. Um, and this will also kind of like impose a partitioning scheme um for every board. Where does the code live? Does it have a second slot for OTAA? Does it where does it the file system live? That sort of stuff. Um, so I do want to take a look at how Zephr Arduino works because they have Arduino built on top of Zephr now. And I want to make sure that that the UF2 bootloader would work with that. So I'll take a look there. Um, and yeah, that's going to be most of my week is is the UF2 stuff. >> Great. Thank you. And now we'll hear from Mikeclar. Oh, I'm still working on the SIWX917, which is a chip that's really uh functionally much like the ESP32S3 in terms of its behavior behavior. It's a Scilabs chip that um I guess TI is acquiring all silab. So, I guess it's sort of an obscure thing to look into and almost redundant, but um anyway, it's getting pretty close. I think the the workflow's done. It's just a bunch of PRs going through now. So, um, uh, something that came up in the Circuit Python channel last week was DAV, which is the ability, it provides the ability to mount Circuit Python boards like the Feather V2. Um, so you actually can see it on your file system and traverse it and other things just like from the command line as you would with any of the other boards that have native USB. Um, so credit to Hop Cappy for bringing this up, but that works really well. Like I'm amazed how well that works for Mac OS and Linux. Um, that's a a really useful way to access boards and maybe that's something uh we can use going forward. Um, and I have uh two more chips I'm looking at just based on the last meeting. So the RA8D1 which is a very robust dev kit um of a chip that I've just picked up. So it has quite a bit of flash and memory uh 64 megabytes. It's already running a sort of a homemade Linux on it with Blinka um just as a sort of proof of concept. Not that useful. And um we did have a circuit Python port. I have to go back to that now and see how much more work that needs to be sort of functional. But that could be an interesting chip for um some more high performance applications like a tablet. Um and then the ESP32- S31. Um I think a few people have been ordering them and have them in hand now. Mine should be here in the next day or two and I I think it's already kind of working but it just needs more work to actually be functional. Um so I'll be looking at that this week as well. >> Very cool. And I didn't know about the DV stuff for the non-native C Python boards. I have to look into that because when I write guides trying to document the C Python stuff for those kind of boards can get pretty tricky. Uh so thank you. And I'm not seeing any in the weeds topics. So, I think we can move to wrap up. Uh, this has been Circa Python Weekly for Monday, August 24th, 2026. Thank you everyone who participated. If you want to support Adafruit and Circython and those of us that work on Circython, consider purchasing from the Adafruit shop at Adafruit.com. Video this meeting will be released on YouTube at youtube.com/adafruit. And the podcast will be available on major podcast services. It'll also be featured in Python for microcontroller newsletter. Visit adafruit.com to subscribe. Next meeting will be held next Monday as usual at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, 11:00 a.m. Pacific. This meeting is held on the Adafruit Discord, which you can join by going to Adafruit.it/isord. To be notified about the meeting and any changes to a time or day, you can ask to be added to the circumth's role on Discord. And we hope to see you all next week. Thanks everyone.