August 2025 Meetup

Damien talks v1.26, Matt delivers the news roundup

News Round-up

Housekeeping

Proposed changes to the Meetup format!

Feedback/issues

The news roundup is valuable to some people but tough for newcomers
Would like more time to work on projects during the meetup
The news roundup takes a lot of effort

One suggestion: Only do a news roundup every quarter and host it online-only. Meetups would focus on projects.

Another: No news roundups. Record them straight to YouTube when we can get around to them.

Also: Meetup is horrendously expensive and PSF grants have been used up.

Big Ticket Items

Raspberry Pi addresses erratum

RP2350 A4

Raspberry Pi RP2350 A4 stepping fixes E9 GPIO Erratum, glitching bugs, introduces 2MB flash variants

Sparkfun ported OpenCV to MicroPython

Sparkfun released a video: We ported OpenCV to MicroPython!

Always great to see manufacturers contributing! Also, their recent Experiential Robotics Platform (XRP) is a pretty neat starting point for a simple, affordable robot platform.

No, I’m not sure why they didn’t start with OpenMV either.

PyCon AU

A reminder that PyCon AU 2025 is only a few weeks away!

Hardware News

ManT1S

Patrick Van Oosterwijck is gathering support for the ManT1S, a small board featuring an ESP32 (2MB/8MB) and support for Single Pair Ethernet. With out-of-the-box support for MicroPython.

Hackster.io covered the announcement: Silicognition’s ManT1S Is a MicroPython-Powered Gadget for Easy Single-Pair Ethernet Projects

Powerful, good Single Pair Ethernet T1S support (including PoE), castellated - and there’s a bridge board that allows connection to regular Ethernet. Looks great!

Patrick knows what he’s doing; he previously developed the wESP32, one of the best PoE Ethernet devlopment boards.

Fruit Jam

Adafruit have a new, exciting board out - the Fruit Jam Mini RP2350 Computer.

Specs:

Raspberry Pi RP2350B, 16MB flash, 8MB PSRAM
DVI output (HSTX port)
MicroSD
I2S headphone
USB type C and 2x USB type A (via hub)
ESP32-C6 for radio comms
NeoPixels, buttons, expansion ports

US$40

Olimex RP2350PC

Olimex released a similar-in-concept board, the RP2350PC.

Specs:

Very similar!

25€

ESP32-P4’s out the wazoo

Waveshare (many!)

DFRobot

FireBeetle 2 ESP32-P4

GUITION

M5Stack

M5Stack Core teaser.

Other news

Pocket Deck

This device changed my life: Introducing Pocket Deck:

“Recently I created a kind of generic computer, specialized for productivity. It can do life tracking, journaling, task management, and some fun. Micropython enables standalone application development.”

Preorder the Pocket Deck

US$360 (shipping estimated for October)

RobotWar

Sam Neggs, with the help of Claude Sonnet 4, created a clone of the old classic Apple II game/simulator, RobotWar, in MicroPython.

The aim of the game is to write a computer program to operate a robot. Sam’s application implements an interpreter for the original language, renders to a display and uses multithreading and viper for better performance.

8x8 Bad Apple

“This was a dumb idea”

Avimanyu Dutta released Bad Apple on 64 pixels. Best described with the animated gif!

Via Reddit.

Kevin McAleer: Pico Drone

Kevin works on the Pico Drone, implementation is all MicroPython.

Pico Drone - can we build a drone using a Raspberry Pi Pico?

Quick Bytes

Kiwi PyCon 2025

This year, Kiwi PyCon 2025 has a couple of MicroPython Workshops. One Beginner and an Advanced session. If anyone can help review material - or even better attend! - please reach out.