tulipcc VS circuitpython

> At the risk of being shouted down, this is another one of those products that looks great on impulse buy, but when you try to use that tiny keyboard and screen to do any real work with it, the chore of use becomes apparent.

I purchased one on impulse after this HN post, and some notes so far:

* Keyboard is a hell of a lot smaller than expected. I have small fingers and even this is a bit of a challenge for me. I very much doubt anybody will be coding on this thing. I am thinking mostly to use it as a way of making brief notes and reading RSS feeds.

* The screen is fine, it's something you can live with.

* I installed tulipcc on it (micropython), definitely the right choice to getting started on it quickly.

* I tried to print a case [2] but my printer is not good enough, I think I will send them off to China to be printed on an SLA printer.

[1] https://github.com/bwhitman/tulipcc

[2] https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6287501

Source + schematics here

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 :(

Try CircuitPython 8.0.3. The commit log has a couple networking changes for the Pico. My MQTT client seems to have fewer connection issues though they could be a fluke https://github.com/adafruit/circuitpython/compare/8.0.2...8.0.3