circuitpython VS myhdl

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 :(

Apparently this is unrelated to MyHDL, another hardware description language in Python. Searching HN finds posts about MyHDL going back 16 years.

https://www.myhdl.org/

https://github.com/myhdl/myhdl

Also PyMTL, PyRTL, and MyHDL.

MyHDL

Any hardware designers here who use Python for designing hardware? There are a bunch of libraries that all seem promising MyHDL, PyRTL, PyVerilog, PyLog, PyMTL3, ... All seem to work roughly the same. Write code in Python and transpile it to VHDL/Verilog. Which of these are popular and well-maintained? MyHDL looks good but it's last release was 0.10 in 2018 and for hardware design you don't want to rely on 0.x software. Anything like Chisel for Python.

It is : https://www.myhdl.org/

Personally I have fond memories of MyHDL [0], which may be seen as another "code-to-silicon" converter (or at least as the first step of a code-to-silicon workflow). I used it only briefly, and on a school project that had surprisingly little to do with actual hardware design [1], but it really felt "Pythonic" in the best possible way.

[0]: https://www.myhdl.org/

[1]: https://github.com/lou1306/gssi/tree/master/2pc