September 2026 Meetup
Sean delivers the news roundup, Matt runs us through his latest hardware
News Round-up
Sean delivers the news roundup:
Headlines
MicroPython Debugger
GHI Electronics have created a real source-level hardware debugger for MicroPython, with breakpoints, call stack, and variables, just like you’d expect for debugging code in an IDE.
The project consists of a VSCode extension and some custom MicroPython firmware, and supports RP2040, RP2350, ESP32-S2, and ESP32-S3.
Their firmware changes are open source, so if you have a different board to the ones they provide builds for then maybe it won’t be too hard to port.
Check out their announcement to get started.
Incremental Garbage Collection
Originally developed for the Pocket Deck, raspy135 has published their changes that introduce “incremental” garbage collection.
The idea is that rather than stopping to do all of the garbage collection on the system, possibly blocking for a “long” time (at least long in a real-time sense, where there are tasks that need to run reliably and frequently), incremental GC can do it in smaller chunks and more often if required – giving more dependable real-timer performance. For the Pocket Deck this was needed to keep the display running at around 50 Hz whilst also doing the other background work that it does.
The author doesn’t have plans to try to submit this as a PR, so if it’s something you’re interested in then you’ll have to build it yourself. Only the ESP32 and Unix ports are supported.
Hardware news
Makerphone 2.0 (Kickstarter)
A follow-up from 2018’s original Makerphone, the 2.0 is still a phone that you build yourself – but no soldering is required this time around. It’s powered by an ESP32-S3 and an unspecified 4G LTE modem, with a 160×128 colour display and an old-school keypad style.
The main pitch seems to be for education, and they have an AI-powered app called VibeBoy which aims to help a user write code for their Makerphone and help them understand how that code works.
There’s also a companion smart watch-esque gadget, the Makerband, which can pair over Bluetooth with the Makerphone (or an Android or iOS device)
US$189 for the phone and the watch, ends October 11
TriviaPOD (M5Stack)
Digital games without the distractions of a smartphone seems to be the pitch here, the TriviaPOD touts itself as a “tiny trivia machine built for real family play”.
It looks like a pretty neat bit of kit, and is a complete ready-to-use product – but it’s also powered by an ESP32-S3 so could also form the basis for your next MicroPython project (there’s also the physically similar but more development-focussed StopWatch, which exposes a range of GPIO on the rear)
US$39, available to pre-order
XIAO 1.14’’ IPS Display (SeeedStudio)
A cute little XIAO board with both nRF52840 and ESP32-S3 options, with a 1.14 inch colour IPS display.
Comes with all the usual interfaces, like a Grove I²C port, IMU, LiPo battery connector, and some buttons.
Their wiki includes Arduino instructions, but the ST7789 display driver is well supported in MicroPython – and the full KiCAD schematics are available.
US$16.90
ELM11 Feather (Crowd Supply)
This one is partly hardware news, and partly software…
The ELM11-Feather is dev board in the Adafruit Feather form factor, and is natively programmable with Lua (as well as C, SystemVerilog, and VHDL)
Although it looks like a pretty standard dev kit, the ELM11-Feather actually uses a GoWIN FPGA (part GW1NR9-C, specifically). As such, the hardware can be redefined to provide you exactly the peripherals that you need – there’s 23 I/O pins, each supporting GPIO, PWM, UART, SPI, and I²C.
The creators, BrisbaneSilicon, also have an IDE to guide you through the board setup, including assigning the pins to a hardware-backed peripheral. There’s also details on how to extend the FPGA logic in the hardware layer, and how to create the necessary C driver layer to then use that hardware from Lua.
No specific word on MicroPython, but maybe someone will make a port!
US$39, available now
ESP32 Wi-Fi WLED Digital LED Controller (Altronics)
The Gledopto GL-C-016WL-D contains an ESP32 set up in a neat package for driving addressable LED strips, like the ones here in the makerspace
Built to use the WLED app, it can also be reprogrammed to run whatever MicroPython code you like (hopefully we’ll get to play with it this evening)
AU$39.50
Software news
PyBLE
PyBLE lets you edit, transfer, run, and stop MicroPython programs on a compatible microcontroller board over Bluetooth Low Energy. Its normal workflow needs no USB serial connection, Wi-Fi onboarding, cloud account, or telemetry.
Once the required firmware has been initially loaded onto a supported device (various ESP32s, Pi Pico 2 W), further code updates are done entirely over BLE from an iPad or Android tablet – no USB required!
Currently available as a beta, check it out!
ESP IDE
In a similar vein, there’s also ESP IDE – which uses Blockly to let you create applications and switch between blocks and MicroPython code. It runs in the browser, using WebSerial and WebUSB. Originally and natively available in the Czech language, the newest versions now also have excellent English and German translations.
It has similar board support, i.e. most ESP32s and Raspberry Pi Pico boards. Because it can use USB it doesn’t depend on a board that has Bluetooth.
PyMCU
This is really cool – PyMCU takes a subset of the Python language and compiles it “ahead of time” into assembly machine code. Nothing to do with MicroPython per-se, but still using Python on microcontrollers – just in a different way.
The project is in alpha for 8-bit AVRs (targeting the ATmega328p, i.e. classic Arduino), and is working on support for ARM Cortex-M. Their example of a blinky LED compiles into a 142 byte binary, compared with over a kilobyte for the same thing in Arduino (MicroPython can’t run on an AVR but on supported boards is much bigger than that!)
They have their own native HAL, as well as compatibilty wrappers for MicroPython and CircuitPython, which could eventually mean that a large chunk of existing code could be used with PyMCU without modification.
It’s quite a bit different to what we normally look at, in particular if you’ve really been wanting to write Python code for an AVR microcontroller, you should check it out!
Projects
ISURLOG
An open source commercially available industrial datalogger device, featuring NB-IoT and LoRa connectivity, with firmware written in MicroPython. It’s an interesting example of a real product that uses MicroPython – another data point to defend against those that argue “you can’t use MicroPython in production”
See their discussion post, website, and also an interesting blog post on using satellite connectivity with the board.
Full-Stack Flight – MicroPython quadcopter controller
An excellent write-up on the Centauri Quadcopter, by Tim Hanewich. Talks about the various performance considerations for doing lots of calculations quickly, to build up a control loop to keep a drone in the air.
The blog post is part of a series on creating the quadcopter, well worth a read.
Printing to an e-ink screen
An e-ink screen is meant to look like paper, right? So why not “print” to it like paper? Nishant Joshi has an amusing write-up on creating some CrossPoint firmware that exposes the e-reader as an IPP-enabled printer.
It’s not in MicroPython, but it’s still a great example of learning problem-solving techniques – and it’s a bit of fun.
Pimoroni Galatic Unicorn Train Countdown Clock
I guess software developers are always running late for the train? At least Matt Davison is, with his take on a live departures board – in his case using the UK National Rail API.
Check it out here, it’s all MicroPython
Quick bytes
turbo
This is a nifty little wrapper around CircuitPython’s native and viper machine-code support, with the aim of making it easier to manage loading mpy files onto a board – it takes care of running mpy-cross for you and appropriately naming and arranging files on the target device. They also have a lightly modified firmware build which removes the on-board compiler, the idea being everything is bytecode compiled before loading, thus giving you back some RAM on the board.
Targets CircuitPython, but it also looks like it wouldn’t be hard to get a version working for MicroPython – since it’s just wrappers around existing tools.
SPIDriver
Lets you control any SPI device from a desktop computer. Great for debugging. Now with C firmware for the RP2040 (previously it used a Silabs EFM8BB10).
Claude forgets my ESP32 isn’t a full computer
Nick Lewis has some tips for using Claude to vibe-code MicroPython, he’s using an ESP32 but it would apply equally to any other port. Claude is pretty good at writing MicroPython, but sometimes “forgets” that it’s a microcontroller – but with some suitable prompting can be corralled into being better.
RE-BOUND
RE-BOUND is a feature-rich, high-speed brick-breaking arcade game engineered specifically for the 72x40 monochrome OLED display of the Thumby micro-console!
Name your own price, get it here!
Matt’s New Hardware
Midjourney fun
