circuitpython VS moddable

The keypad itself can mimic any keypresses on a regular keyboard if the Pico is installed with CircuitPython, so the Pico-to-Mac communication is already set up. For the Mac to communicate with the Pico, I managed to piece the instructions together from various sources. That’s the bit I’ll be bringing together into this article.

As another point for those interested, it (to my knowledge) is currently the ONLY implementation of a scoring machine that the firmware for the device is written in Circuit Python. which gives this unit an advantage when it comes to any and all multi tasking that the unit may need to do.

The barrier to entry has never been lower. Last night I prototyped some code in Python on my Mac to talk to a Bluetooth peripheral, and then had ChatGPT translate it to Arduino C++ code for a $5 ESP32 which mostly worked on the first go.

You can even run Python on microcontrollers these days. See Adafruit's https://circuitpython.org for which they publish modules for many (almost all?) of the sensors they sell. The modern microcontroller frameworks hide much of the complexity of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, filesystems, etc. so you can do complicated things with minimal effort. You can really cobble something together in an afternoon.

The Pico runs CircuitPython and uses Adafruit's HID library to emulate a keyboard. It's also possible to emulate a mouse and a gamepad (there are some experiments for gamepad emulation in experiments).

Asked your question in the adafruit discord and they said there's no HT1632c library for circuit python yet. There is a library for micropython. You can request to have it ported from the Micropython library I linked to by opening a feature request in the Circuit Python Github. That would be your best option for now or attempt to port the library yourself.

Microcontrollers can run Python now https://circuitpython.org/

I'm aware of two versions of Python for microcontrollers. Micro Python and Circuit Python

I tried to look in https://github.com/adafruit/circuitpython/tree/main/shared-bindings at audiocore, audioio, an audiomixer looking for a way to access the sample counter manually but I have no clue what I'm looking at :(

Your project might be a good candidate for the Moddable SDK: https://github.com/Moddable-OpenSource/moddable In particular the "mods" feature that allows sandboxed user scripts.

> meaning that to deploy those apps requires embedding an entire web browser into every app

It doesn't require it, that's just what they choose, and it has little to do with the language. (Besides, if you actually observe them—and ignore what they tell you about liking JS—then it's clear that most of them hate their preferred language.) Languages and the bindings that a particular runtime exposes are orthogonal. You can have GTK apps written in JS, for example, or you can write a program in JS that compiles into a binary that runs on a microcontroller[2].

This is much more of a problem with the culture of Electron and the adjacent NPM ecosystem than it is anything else. Conflating the source of these problems is a great way to tank any would-be activism meant to solve them.

1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Shell>

2. <https://github.com/Moddable-OpenSource/moddable/blob/public/...>

I experimented with Moddable some time ago and also contributed a module for Linux. It's written in C and I found the code quite readable, and the entire architecture good too. It's almost ES6 complete too.

https://github.com/Moddable-OpenSource/moddable

https://www.moddable.com/

There's JavaScript/ECMAScript via Moddable's XS engine: https://github.com/Moddable-OpenSource/moddable

"A typical microcontroller used with the Moddable SDK has about 45 KB of free memory, 1 MB of Flash ROM, and runs at 80 MHz. The Moddable SDK uses many different techniques, both at build time and at run time, to work efficiently on these devices."

You think that’s bad. How about JavaScript for embedded https://github.com/Moddable-OpenSource/moddable