CircuitPython Weekly Meeting for August 31, 2026 @circuitpython #circuitpython #adafruit

Hello everyone. This is the Circuit Python weekly meeting for August 31st, 2026. It's the time of week where we get together to talk about all things Circuit Python. I'm Dan 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 is primarily sponsored by Adafruit. So if you want to support Adafruit and Circuit Python, consider purchasing hardware from Adafruit.com. We host this meeting on the Adafruit Discord server. You can join anytime by going to adafru.it/isord. We hold the meeting in the circuit python dev text channel and the Circuit Python voice channel. This meeting typically happens on Mondays at 2 p.m. US Eastern time, 11:00 a.m. Pacific time, except when it coincides with US holiday. There's a notes document uh about the meeting. In that document, there's a note linked 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'd like to receive these notifications, ask us to add you to the Atsign Circinistas Discord role. As I mentioned, there's a shared note documents that accompanies the meeting and recording. You could contribute to this document beforehand. The final notes document includes timestamps to go along with the video, so you can use the document to skip around and view the parts of the meeting that interest you most. The meeting tends to run about 30 minutes. After each meeting, we post a link for the next meeting's notes document to the Circuit Python dev channel on the Adafruit Discord. You can check the pinned messages in that channel to find a link to the latest oats doc so you can add your notes for the following meeting. If you wish to participate but cannot attend, feel free to leave hug reports and status updates in the document for us to read out during the meeting. This meeting is held in five parts. I'll go over these parts as we get to them. Okay. So uh first of all let me take a timestamp for the first section which is uh community news. Um that's a look at all things circuit Python and Python and hardware uh in the community. It's a usually a set of items chosen from our Python weekly Python and microcontrollers newsletter. So we'll start um first of all uh micro Python uh version 129.0 has been released. Uh there's a more detailed uh description in the Python or microcontrollers newsletter. You can also look at the release notes. There's a link to that on GitHub. This is kind of a uh kind of a typical release. There are new ports and features, fixes, and so forth. There are no uh really dramatic changes that I see here, but there are some interesting ones. Uh next up, uh Circuit Python 1030 release candidate zero and just today 1030 final were released. Um it's the latest minor revision of circuit python and it's a new stable release and uh there's pointers uh to the github release uh notes and the adafruit blog entry which is just the release notes in a different form. So uh please try out the latest stable release and there'll be more news about that in status updates. Okay, next up, um, uh, Espressive has released a Linux board support package developer preview for the ESP32 S31 risk 5 microprocessor. The ESP32 S31 microprocessor is getting Linux support from Expressive. Uh, this microprocessor was first unveiled in March. There are two development boards available. uh in May. Uh they're not they tend to go out of stock and in stock easily. They're I've seen that they're going to be in stock in September or October by the major distributors. You can get them from the official espresso store on AliExpress right now sometimes and they did announce mass production of this chip a few weeks ago. Very interestingly, this chip which is risk 5 features a memory management u an MMU which really makes Linux run uh much better and safe and more safely. And the development boards that are on sale right now have 16 megabytes of PS RAM. So as it says a minimal Linux image is possible. Um I remember when I ran Linux under a megabyte. So, uh, Expressive Systems has now released. So, anyway, there's a link to that and, uh, that looks very interesting in the long run and I'm sure we'll be interested in getting Blinket to run on this at some point. Okay. Uh, finally, we've got um an item Todd Kurt. Notice Toddbot has a Circuit Python void board viewer that lets you compare two Circuit Python compatible boards or more than two. And so you can look at these side by side, see what features they have, what the pins are, and so forth. Um, take a look. It's very cute. Uh, maybe it's something that we should add to the circuit python.org uh website at some point. So, where did all this news come from? It came from the Python and microjud's weekly newsletter produced by an it's a circuit Python comm. It's music Python community run newsletter. It's emailed every Monday. Uh there's a pointer to the archives in the notes document. It highlights latest latest Python and hardware news from around the web including Circuit Python and Python and MicroPython developments. It's got all kinds of projects and everything. Please contribute to it. If you got your own news or you see a neat project or news item, email cpnews adafruit.com. We really appreciate your contributions to the newsletter. All right. U next up we've got um state of circuit python uh the libraries and blinka. This is a quantitative overview of the entire project. It gives us a chance to look at the health project separate from our status updates. We'll talk about the project overall and then separately discuss the circuit python core the libraries and blinka. So, um, take a time stamp overall. In the past week, there were 41 pull requests merged, which is, uh, a lot, by 10 authors. Um, uh, Mikeclar and Lin Smittka have had a number of PRs recently, so they're not brand new, but we appreciate that, really appreciate their efforts. And there were four reviewers. Um, there were four issues closed by two people and eight open by four people. And next up, we'll talk about the Circuit Python core. And, uh, Scott, could you tell us about that? >> Yeah, totally. Um, so 36 poll requests merge, which might be a record for us. Uh, we had seven different authors. Uh, some infrequent folks are Mikey Scolar and Lint Smika. Um, and then on the bot side, we had both Weblate and then also Lady Ada has a a claw going um that did one fix as well. Um, and she obviously helped with that too. Uh, so that's where we are. Poll request. Dan and I were reviewers, but again, if if folks uh feel like they've done enough of the stuff, um we'd love to have more reviewers. Um so, let us know if you're interested in doing core reviews. Uh we have 21 uh open poll requests, uh currently. Um about half those are pretty old and then half those are really new. Um so, it'd be great to go back to those old ones and just figure out what what the plan is with them. Um I think a number of those are just board support uh stuff. Um so if people didn't get back to us, we should just close them. Uh but we are under our goal of being on a single page, which is 25. Uh issues wise for the core, we had three closed issues by one person, six opened by two people. So we actually have three more issues for a total of uh 767. Um we have eight active milestones. Um 1030 was open today. Uh it has no open issues. Uh Dan, I assume the note that it's going to be closed because now we are on to 10.3.x which has two open issues. These are things that we'd like to get in something like a 10.3.1. Um we don't currently have a 10.4 uh milestone, so we're kind of in 10.3 land for now. Um we do have 54 open issues on 10xx, which are things that would be like kind of nice to have u before we do a major thing. Um, we have 662 uh open long-term issues. These are things that kind of like ADA root funded folks aren't planning on picking up anytime soon. Uh, but if folks uh find something there that you'd like to work on or you filed an issue and we've marked it long term, that doesn't mean you you or somebody else can't work on it. Um, we're still happy to support you doing reviews and and giving tips on how to do it. Um, it just means that we're not going to to actively focus on it. Uh and then lastly, we have zero issues not assigned to milestone. So we are uh kind of we have all incoming issues triaged um today and tomorrow and Wednesday. We'll definitely keep a lookout um since we have a new stable release and just make sure that nothing major comes up with that. Um so that's where we are with the core. >> Okay. Thank you, Scott. Next up, uh we've got uh the library section and Tim, also known as foamy guy, will tell us about those. >> Yeah, thanks Dan. This uh section does cover all of the circuit Python libraries which are released on GitHub in uh repositories that we call bundles. Uh we have the Adafruit library bundle which has 399 libraries in it right now. So just one shy of 400. Uh and we have the community library bundle which has 183 libraries in that one. Um for a total right now of 582 different Python libraries that support various uh device um hardware and other helper functionality on Circuit Python devices. Um over the past week in the Adafruit bundle we had five pull requests merged by four authors. Um thanks to Tedar, um Toddbot, Liz, and myself. Uh we had three reviewers thanks to Scott, Liz, and myself. Uh of the pull requests that were merged, we were definitely on the brand new side of things this week. The oldest one was only two days old. Uh and the newest ones were only 1 day old when they were merged. That leaves us with 42 pull requests open uh across all of the Adafruit Library bundles. The oldest one of those is a draft that is up to 1474 days. Uh the newest one right now is actually 3 days. We don't have a a brand new one, at least as of the time of these stats. Um issues wise, last week we had one issue uh or I should say over the last seven days um we had one issue closed by one person, one issue opened up by one person. That leaves us with 772 open issues uh across the Adafruit Library uh bundle. And there are two of those that are labeled good first issues. Uh you could find those two and the rest listed out over at circuitython.org/contributing which is a website where you should head if you do want to get involved in uh CircuitPython on the Python side of things. uh reviewing uh pull request is a great place to get started. That tends to be where we point folks who want to get involved but don't have uh anything specific that they actually want to work on. So you can uh go through the the list of uh pull requests that are on that page circuit.org/contributing. You can click through to GitHub, read up on what that pull request is, what the proposed change does, is it adding a new feature, uh fixing a bug, what uh what have you. And you can look over uh the changes. You can look at the code for syntax, spelling, uh logic, uh anything like that. If you have the hardware, you can test it out on a device and then leave a comment on GitHub and let letting us know how it went. Uh when you looked over the code, did you find anything? Does it all look good to you? Uh if you were able to test it out on hardware, let us know how that part went. Um and just put a uh all that info in a comment on GitHub. And then if you'd like to uh if you get comfortable with that process, you like to get leveled up to join the review team that we have on GitHub, uh we can work with you to add you on there, which will give you uh some additional notifications and stuff to find uh even more stuff to review. If you'd like to start getting your hands uh dirty, so to speak, contributing some of your own code, you can also do that from the same contributing page. If you click over to the issues tab, you will find a uh a list of uh issues. These are similar links over to GitHub, but they don't have a proposed change yet. there's nothing to review uh because they're waiting for a person to come along and implement whatever the issue is asking for. It might be fixing a bug or adding a new feature uh new example or enhancement uh to the library. So uh you could uh work on that and then submit a PR with a solution to that issue. We do have a learn guide for contributing to Circuit Python using Git and GitHub. And we also uh have folks who are around here on the Discord and the help with Circuit Python channel who are more than happy to help you get spun up. So, if you want to start reviewing or contributing and you're having uh trouble with any part of the process, just come say hi to us on Discord. Let us know what kind of issue you're having and we would be happy to help you out. Uh we want everyone to be able to uh contribute in a way that works for them. Uh and I will leave you with the new uh libraries for the week. In the Adafruit bundle, we have uh TAS2505. That's a DAC audio driver. We have the GP843. Uh I'm not actually sure what that one is. And then in the community bundle, we have the TS20, which is a touch driver over in the community bundle by Toddbot. Uh, and that's what we've got for libraries this week. Thanks. >> All right. Thank you, Tim. Next up, we'll talk about um Blinka. Um, Blinka is our compatibility layer for Circuit Python on single board computers like Raspberry Pi. So, this is a uh Python package that runs under regular Python, also known as C Python. uh under Linux and it lets you um it emulates it it it emulates circuit Python code. So it has things like board and digital IO in it that are not part of regular Python, but it makes the Linux computer that you're using uh support those things. So it's really handy. You can write code that runs both on a microcontroller and on a Linux box. So I'll tell you about that. Uh in the past week we've had zero pull requests. There are 15 open poll requests. Um there was one new issue opened by somebody and there are now 80 open issues and we support 174 boards under the Blinka library which is great. Okay. Uh next up we'll talk about um HUG reports. Hug reports is a chance to highlight folks in the Circuit Python community and beyond for doing awesome things. So, I'll start and we'll just go down the list of hug reports uh alphabetically. If you're text only or you're missing the meeting, I'll just read your notes when I get to them in the list. All right. So, as I said, I'll start. Um, so I want to thank everyone who's a lot of people who contributed to Circuit Python 1030 final. This is quite a substantial release. Even though uh it's a minor release, there are more than 80 poll requests in there and uh it really reflects a lot of work. Like to thank Scott uh for uh discussions last week about BLE and also uh discussions about using LLMs more effectively. Um, thanks to Mikey Sclar who's been submitting numerous numerous bug fixes in the past uh, several weeks. Um, thanks to uh, Foy Guy Tim for working on the tricky port of Circuit Python to the Teenage Engineering SP1, which is an unusual box and board and you there are a lot of tricky things about it like a special boot loader and so forth. And thanks to Lind Smidka or just Smidka uh who's been doing a lot of Zephrixes recently and did the Pico game stuff which went into 1030 final. All right, next up we've got Mikey if you'd like to speak. Yep. Um well, I want to give a special thanks to Scott for all his help with a slew of PRs to bring up the new Silabs chip. Um that was quite a bit last week to the point where the CI was just crawling along with the other activity and uh he Scott for hosting me in real life. I came up to visit him at his office and got to check out his new office which he's in today and it was uh really helpful to meet someone in person and you know helped get through some of the trouble we've been having with just u the slew of AI stuff coming in uh that I'm mostly responsible for producing. So anyway, thank you. >> All right, thank you Mikey. Okay, next up we've got Tim Foamy guy. >> All right, thanks Dan. Yes, I have got a hug report first for SMA uh for some more updates uh and information about the Picoame uh level editor. Uh as well uh I will just say uh broadly another hug report for Picoame in general. Uh like Dan mentioned that's uh merged in and um just really appreciate all the work that SMA has put into it. Uh they've also been uh watching my streams and they've seen uh bits and pieces where I've strugg str struggled with uh the level editor and the APIs and different things and they've gone back and made uh a boatload of changes and improvements and they've been sending me those. I even have uh some more that came in just before this meeting that I can check out later. So, uh huge thanks to them for all the work and all of the improvements um that they have done uh to Picoame and the surrounding stuff. It really is a very cool project that I'm having a lot of fun with. Uh, and then also for me, thanks to um Jay, let's see, is it Jay Burchchall SVG over on GitHub? This person submitted a fix for USB audio uh on Windows. This is a relatively new feature in Circuit Python that I uh worked on recently. Uh I don't have the ability to test in Windows. So, I think they were amongst the first uh people who tried it there, found an issue with it, and submitted a uh a fix for that. So, huge thanks to them uh for doing so. And that's what I've got. Thanks. >> All right. Thanks very much. Okay. And finally, we have Scott. >> Hello. Thank you. Uh first again a hug to Smittka for Picoame. And uh also just a shout out uh we were kind of holding off on 10.3 final for them to do a doc review uh to merge in Picoame and they got to it earlier than they said they would. So that's helpful. I appreciate that. I hope you weren't too up too late doing that. And then also uh Hunk report to GR Grant who's been doing a bunch of fixes in the library side. Uh and I just wanted to shout out them for their NTP library fixes, including the ability to like specify four different ones that you can fail over to uh in case the first one doesn't want to talk to you for some reason. So thanks to GR Grant for that. >> Okay, that's it. Thank you, Scott. Uh next up, our major section is um status updates. Um, this is our time can type properly. There we go. Um, this is our time to tell folks we're up to individually. So, I'll start and then we'll go through everybody as before. Uh, when I call on someone, they take a couple of minutes to talk about what they've been doing since the last meeting and what they're going to be doing until the next meeting. And if some discussion ensues, we can always move that to the in the weeds section. So um review starting um kind of the big news is that as I mentioned I released 1030 RC0 RC.0 last week and then uh 1030 final today. So that's available for everyone to use and we hope please try it. Um there 1031 will follow quite soon. We have a whole backlog of PRs and things in the works, but we wanted to get to cut a release. We can't wait for everything. We we're getting PRs faster than we can merge them. So, uh, which is great. Uh, so, uh, we'll we'll we'll have we'll have another big batch of PRs when we merge when we do 1031. And personally, I've been also been working on fixing several BE issues, mostly on Expressive that are related to getting the BE workflow uh working. Um what these bugs are actually, especially on expressive, these are just bugs that are actually in B in general also. So, it'll fix those things. And they're also bugs to fix on the workflow client side. And so, there'll be more of those on the way. I'm working on that stuff in earnest. All right. Uh next up I'll read Fed A2's um contribution. Um working on Rust support for Circuit Python 103 with support for ESP and NRF. Uh need to integrate with uh MPY tools. That's Micropython tools. To test this support I made a basic calculator plus text module and ported Adafruit debounce and Adafruit tix. This sounds very interesting and we really looking forward to hear more about that. Added support for the Mosyworks base duo board to Circuit Python. Added LR1121 radio support. That's lure on 915 meghertz and 2.4 GHz. And creating a port of the meshtastic client in Rust. Most basic features are ready. It's both compatible with the standard firmware for mobile devices, but also has a very cool integration ripple. So that also sounds really interesting. Okay. Um, next up, uh, Tim will tell us about what he's doing. >> Thanks, Dan. I have been, uh, working mostly on the SP1, uh, circuit Python support as well as a new EMC eMMC IO module. And this device has a eMMC storage chip on it, uh, with about 4 gigs to store, uh, songs is what it's intended for. So, uh, one of the things that I worked on as part of this project was support for that and getting automounting working and getting it. So Circuit Python can read the files from there. Uh so I have PRs open for those. I'm keeping an eye out there handling any feedback as it comes in. Um I have uh aside from that been um trying to finish up the guide. So uh finishing up the last couple of guide pages, getting everything in place to where I can just drop in final links once everything is ready to go. Uh and then uh today in particular, I have been working on a couple videos. a short video for uh introduction which I usually do on the first page of the guide and then a couple videos for uh how to like um using the flashing page to flash circuit Python to it and then one more that will show the controls and how to load songs and stuff to use uh the actual demo project uh code. So um that is what I am up to mostly today is trying to wrap up uh the stuff in the guide and then uh the other thing which I did look into uh late last week was the USB audio fix PR that was submitted. I mentioned that one before. Uh and uh like I said, I don't have any way to test it on Windows, so I can't confirm sort of the the main uh purpose of it. But what I can do is run it on Linux uh and confirm that everything is still working good there. And I can also check uh in this case it um it modified the way that the device uh appears as well. Uh so I can actually check on that from the Linux side too to confirm what changes were um in there. So uh that is what I'm up to uh this week. Thanks. >> All right. Thank you. All right. F. Uh, next up is Mikey Squire. >> So, in the last week, I submitted maybe a dozen PRs for the Scilabs 917 chip to get established. And it's, uh, pretty far along with its Wi-Fi work at this point. Um, you know, where it's functional and it can scan networks and, um, respond to ping and things like that. And I've got some upstreams that have been approved and are about to be merged. So, that should probably just be pushed along this week with a a few small PRs to complete the Wi-Fi side of it. Um, and then there were some other kind of PRs I did just related to patches last week related to 103. I was just kind of benchmarking it with the MicroPython benchmarks uh nightly to see if there was anything that was off and there was uh some of the ESP32s weren't showing up with a MAC address at the ripple on boot. um it's really in the bootout.ext and there were some large micro SD file system support that was lost and just some minor fixes that went into 103. Um, probably one of the more interesting ones that we caught last week was um, the STM32 has had a seven-year open issue on the Arduino side. And I mentioned that because it affects the circuit Python side too, but it wasn't reliably booting into bootloadader mode and um just adding a couple retries to that process and I submitted PRs for those as well on the Circuit Python and Arduino core so that we can reliably reliably get into bootloadader and uh you know it's nice to see some of these older bugs go away. Um um for the most part that's it for the last week and I I don't necessarily have much lined up officially for this week, but I have notes from the last meeting. So I probably will end up having more interaction related to some Bluetooth work in Zephr this week. >> All right. Thank you, Mikey. And so finally now we've got um Scott. >> Hello. Uh so yeah, I'm moving office spaces. I'm actually at home right now because I don't have internet in my new space, but I moved completely out of the old one. So, I'm going to walk down there right after we're done here. Uh, the internet install is in well, the Windows starts in 25 minutes. Hopefully, they'll be who knows when they'll be actually be here. Um, and I have a few more things to plug in to get my computer fully going, but I'm getting close. Um, I am out Monday and Tuesday next week as well for the US holiday. And uh the kids have like an inservice day on Tuesday, too. So, we have two days off next week. Um last week I did lots of reviews. I think this week's going to be the same. I think we definitely hit uh LLM fixes, which is great. Um again, just a reminder, keep them small, keep them focused. Uh but five is fine. Um, it's better to have five small PRs than one PR with five fixes because if one of those fixes is questionable, um, it holds up the other four. Whereas, if you have five separate PRs, we can get the four that look good straight in. Um, and if you are able to do automated tests to go along with it, uh, so it makes it really clear what's what was changing before. Um, so yeah, that's my my take on reviews. Um, for safe, uh, I got Zephr safe mode support checked in. Um, I had one test timeout change in, but it looks like I need to add a extended timeout for the safe mode as well. Um, and then I have another CI related change pending dance review, which is just like don't build all the boards when we change the CI. Uh, at least the CI that's not related to building boards. And then I mainly been working on bootloadader um stuff. So this is building taking MCU boot which is what Zephr suggests and making it kind of adafized. Um this means adding UF2 support. Um making it kind of work the same way and and work uniformly across all the boards that we want to support. Um and then I like had to do things like get it to run serial recovery as the same time as UF2. um add a secondary board ID to UF2 files so that we can have one share family ID but then validate that the firmware is for the correct board. Um and then this is also the place that we'll have like the standard partition layouts for all these boards. Um so for boards with existing bootloaders, we'll have a partition layout that is the same or at least compatible. Um, and that way we'll by having it factored out into the bootloadader we'll be able to use it for other zepherbased stuff like if we have ever moved if we ever move Arduino like starting using Arduino Zephr or we like make whipper snapper built on zephr as well but like this is the central place we'll have those partitions and then lastly I did uh kind of kick off a clanker on the pin boxing challenge which seems to be kind of like the last item on our push to get Zephyr really going. Uh, but I suspect we'll actually have some other stuff that comes up for Zephyr, too. But I'm eager to get pin maxing going because it's a it's a bit of a big unknown that I'm I'm excited to work through. Um, so yeah, that's what I'm doing this week and then next week's a short week for me, but after that I'm around until the towards the end of October. I have vacation again. So that's me. >> All right. Thanks, Scott. So that's it. uh for status updates. We don't have any in the weed items today, so we'll just um wrap up. Uh this has been the Circuit Python uh weekly meeting for Monday, August 31st, 2026. Thank you to everyone who participated. If you want to support Adafruit inserted Python and those of us that books inserted Python, please consider purchasing from the Adafruit shop at Adafruit.com. Uh the video of this meeting will be released on YouTube at youtube.com/adafruit and the podcast will be available on major podcast services. Um remember also about the Python for microcontrollers newsletter. You can visit adafruitdaily.com to subscribe. uh next week um I think next week is is right it's Labor Day so the next meeting will be on Tuesday uh next week rather than Monday because it's a US holiday so uh see you that that Tuesday that is um that is the 8th of uh September so we'll see you Okay, take care everybody and I'll stop recording.