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now time for today's keynote so it gives me great pleasure in welcoming lee more freed hello hello i'm here this is amazing because i've never been up this early it's what like 9 a.m for you this is like a i get to fake it um but it's awesome i'm here in new york city uh and it's great to be able to speak here at linux conf australia i i've never been to australia i don't know when i'll be able to go there because uh my country is totally screwed up right now but when possible i would love to visit well we'd love to have you here i know our swag badge team we're very keen to be able to get to see you and i think you've seen a little bit of about our swag badge yeah it's one of the 167 slides we're looking forward to it very much so i'll hand over to you lee more and we'll enjoy your keynote all right thank you i'll enjoy it and uh if the people watching don't enjoy it well i'm sorry but that's what it is i'm the keynote speaker so uh i'm gonna tell you a love story today it's a beautiful love story between uh this snake blinker which i'm wearing on my shirt but it's also my first slide let's go back there okay let's stick like this thank you chris um and blink is our mascot for circuit python but i want to tell you like the background the history and the story behind this because i'm at the point where i'm now meeting kids who like do not remember what it was like to do electronics and so they don't know why we made some choices and i thought that it could be illuminating and uh perhaps inspiring to know the story behind blinka this wonderful snake so um to start off so i'm lemore fried lady aida and i run this company called adafruit and that's me me in front of my pick and place machines i went to school for electronics i like building electronics and for some reason i just didn't want to get a job where somebody told me what to do so instead i got a job where i tell myself what to do and it sucks a lot more but i get to build cool electronics all day so you know we have a hundred plus people we're in new york city um we're a couple blocks from the prada store in the apple store which is pretty exciting and we do electronics and making and 3d printing and all sorts of just like fun stuff that we've been kind of doing this for you know 15 plus years since 2005 when i started making synthesizers and mp3 players from scratch to now we make you know 4 000 different we stock 4 000 different products and make about 400. um we tend to make microcontrollers little boards that have leds or sensors and buttons and people can program them and so this is kind of what got me really excited about electrical engineering when i went to school i was actually a computer scientist i studied like software systems and compilers and stuff and i thought like well like electrical engineering totally sucks because all you do is make stereo systems but then i i got interested in my controllers and i'll show you the microcontroller that i learned on and that totally captivated me because i was very excited to uh you know if i'm going to get carpal tunnel from typing at least i want to be able to show it off at the local pub so um here's like two boards that we design and manufacture in new york city and this is a pre-covered photo on our roof uh so some of the people we have here we have a whole team shipping engineering facilities production finance uh everyone here uh a lot of us were all black but not all of us there's some exceptions during uh the last year uh we've helped out also with new york city's covert response uh new york city got hit really hard in april uh and it was really bad um you know we couldn't get faith shields for example for medical professionals uh so you know we had rolls of plastic and we had foam and we had laser cutters and 3d printers and so we kind of jumped up and said okay well if we're not going to be manufacturing electronics because everything is shut down and locked down how about we help out instead by helping make face shields we made a couple thousand face shields for doctors and here's here's some friends of ours who are wearing them um we also are working and have worked and are still working with folks making open source ventilators using the software and hardware that we've designed because it's easily it's easy to use it's well documented and they can quickly integrate it getting these diy ventilators and sensor systems for ventilators and also now what's interesting is a lot of people are using our sensors to do air quality and air movement studies because uh ventilation is really important you know how how open do the windows have to be to make sure that you're getting full air circulation but not so open that everyone's freezing cold and you have to blast the heat and use a ton of energy so using uh airflow sensors and co2 sensors is part of that as well and uh there's our factory just kind of cool we're not the whole thing we don't have the whole thing we share with a bunch of other companies uh as well including a starbucks in the basement which at the time was like super deadly because like i would have a coffee like every day okay so let's actually get started with the talk itself so i'm going to start in the beginning of what it was like to build electronics because we have to like go full circle from what it used to be which was actually really awesome to like this really murky period to now which is again really awesome so computers used to come with like these parallel ports on the back um these really big db 25 pin things that were designed for printers or scanners and you can actually i looked around so on newegg you can't buy computers with these but you know there's are still sellers of um motherboards that have parallel ports on them and they're still parallel port drivers and linux and windows and it was really cool because you had eight pins general purpose input or output um and you had a couple of like you know busy and ack and whatever pins you could tell the paper end this is for printing you know it was basically a print report but you could really abuse the heck out of this thing because you basically had a direct line to pins that would go high and low so for example you can still to this day buy these cnc controllers so these are for like diy like kind of like 3d printers but they cut material away cnc lathes cnc mills cnc drawing machines they're actually people still use parallel ports because there's actually um and here's an example of a build you know i found this photo on flickr and it's you can sort of see in the the bottom right here this is the parallel port converter and then uh it's plugged into this board and then these are like motor drivers which are massive motor chips and this would be your cnc machine and this is from the manual for the software i just thought this clip art was just so awesome i had to share with you um but basically you know on the bottom left here you'd have a computer and then you have the power and data lines it only shows four wires here but it's really the whole parallel port and then you would run the software on the computer and the software would run on windows 3.1 pretty much was kind of the only thing although there were some linux uh cam softwares written eventually and it would literally just say okay to move the stepper forward toggle the pin once for every step and the stepper would move super cool loved it um this is you know that the parallel port assignments depending on uh you know what hardware you would plug in you would align the pin number for the parallel port to your printer axis so here you've got like x and y and z and and all sorts of good stuff so um this was a software called mac 3 which again you can still buy it um although i don't think a lot of people use it um but yeah if you if you look for a parallel port motherboard on newegg all you get are these like adapters like they don't they don't sell computers with parallel ports really anymore it's it's quite rare to get um although if you you know if you're looking for just that you probably would but like my modern computer it doesn't have one why because we got usb instead and i don't blame them right i mean like on one hand this was like an idyllic time of like innocence when we had parallel ports and we would just plug whatever the hell we wanted into them but it it does limit you there you couldn't have more complicated protocols um there were speed reasons you could only have one parallel port whereas now i think my computer has like 18 000 usb ports so you know we had usb and sort of all that eventually those parallel ports started disappearing so that was i think you know basically a 2000 up to the year 2000 so 2001 2002 about till then people were still doing parallel port stuff and then around 2005-ish um or so um sorry around 2002 or three-ish or so um this microcontroller chip came out and this is the 16 f-84 and in my opinion this chip is uh as important as like the 68 000 or something motorola chip i mean those are important chips too don't get me wrong or the 386 but this chip was really cool now it only had you know 1024 words of program memory so basically a kilobyte of memory 68 bytes of ram you only had a couple only had 35 instructions to learn you would code this in assembly right there at the time you weren't even coding it and see although people did write compilers later for it but what was cool about it was the enhanced enhanced look it's enhanced flash microcontroller okay why because up to that point all microcontrollers that you would get like little devices that could toggle pins up and down um like those parallel ports but you would program came with a eeprom memory like this with a with a glass or a crystal window in it and this is a big ceramic chip and these would cost like 20 bucks or so 10 20 and you would have to use a uv eraser and i used i actually still have i think somewhere my uv eraser uh this is a very fancy one i like has a pull out drawer and everything but the most important thing to note about the uv eraser is the erase time okay that's in minutes not seconds you'd be you'd be waiting 10 20 minutes sometimes to erase your flash and here's the thing if you pulled your flash out too early from the eraser not all of the bits would be erased and so when you try to reprogram it it would fail on verification and then you would have to erase it again so you just like lost twice as much time tragic but the nice thing about this the pic 16 f 84 shown here on the first microcontroller board i used was that it did not have that glass window why or crystal window because you could actually program it in situ you it would erase itself like instantaneously in a second or two and so you could amazing program it and then reprogram it within like a minute or two like you just have to recompile it and then you know connect whatever program or dongle you had and you could program it again so this is amazing in fact at the time you could program these chips through a parallel port that's kind of combining the joy of parallel ports with the joy of microcontrollers it's one of the first board designs i ever did featuring the attiny 2313 also a very early enhanced flash microcontroller um but this one with a slightly more risky uh uh instead of siskiy instruction set you can see that there's this parallel port on the side you would literally like jam that into the back of your computer and then run the command line program to program it with your compiled micro bit code and then this would flash the leds this was a little led flasher thing it would flash the leds back and forth and you could make patterns with it this is what we had for entertainment back in those days um but again you know the the there's this like usb uh we we love this parallel port but eventually the parallel port went away and um one of the side effects was that about 2005 because there was so much usb going around um this is sort of where arduino came up what arduino is kind of a combination of these two things this is a much later arduino but the first one looked similar but if you look down here enhanced flash microcontroller can be reprogrammed without a uv eraser and it has a usb port big chunky parallel but printer port um usb so like the the b type and then a usb 2 serial converter this would take usb data and convert it to a friendly you know rx and tx data in data out signal um and you would plug it into your computer using a usb cable one of these new amazing protocols for your computer you would run the id and you'd program it and i'm sure almost everyone watching this has programmed an id arduino using the ide or a similar id it's really common i mean this this has been now 15 years in the making um non-stop it's kind of the standard for uh electronics and um so there's just like a lovely diagram i made like 20 years ago but basically data is moving back and forth between the computer and the arduino and you can send and receive data as ascii just like a terminal basically data coming back and forth and so let's say you want to measure the temperature in your home like there's i think a talk later i saw about you know measuring uh stuff in your home and automating it so um you would get a temperature sensor even have one here this is a tmp36 although there's many others this is a very simple easy to use analog temperature sensor you give it some voltage on the leftmost pin on the right hand pin you connect ground and an analog voltage comes out you do a little bit of math on the analog voltage and you can get the temperature uh amazing right so um you know this is a original arduino that the one of the earlier arduinos that do hamila you wire it up there's an analog input and then you would open up the ide or this special software that would that was written in java that would run on uh mac windows or linux this is the code you would put in it's c code with some macros called arduino ease in my opinion it's basically just c with some macro help um and you can see in the setup you i don't mean the text a little small but you you set up your serial port you do an analog read you multiply the voltage around just to get it into like you know the the right format and convert it to centigrade and then you print it out to the serial port um so and then if you open up the serial port uh with the terminal software uh minicom works your z term works whatever you want really would work you will get something like this tells you okay i read this analog voltage and this is the temperature it's about 80 degrees at the time um and then like let's say you wanted to connect this to your computer like let's say you want to read the temperature and then actually like data log it or something or maybe you want your computer to send you an email when the temperature gets too high or too low maybe you're you're brewing beer or you're you're monitoring your greenhouse what have you uh you could run some python code this is a different project but it kind of was the only file i could quickly uh find on my computer and this is in python 2. you use the python serial library you open up the serial port com1 dev tty usb 0 what have you you read the bytes in you parse them and then now you have that data that's been transmitted from sorry from the arduino data has been transmitted to your computer and then your computer can act on it so the arduino can run on its own but if you want to have that data show up on your computer you have to sort of transmit it and then do this parsing thing um where you would you can convert the data from the serial port into a floating point number or what have you this is great so people did this for basically forever they're still doing it it's been 15 years and what's nice about this is the the compil the right compile upload debug loop is quite smaller than it used to be so that one thing that's nice about this is that it's only about two to three minutes between i'm writing code i'm compiling it i'm uploading it and i'm testing it and you know one thing that i've i've definitely learned as i've written more and more code is the shorter you can make that loop the better it is because you can learn from your mistakes faster you can debug faster your whole life is just better you can get up and stretch more you know overall i think it's it's a really good positive thing and compared to eeprom based programming this is so much superior that it caused this explosion in arduinos and that's why like arduino basically took over it was such a superior way of programming and then uh so everyone's like really happy and then um about 2012 the raspberry pi came out right and everybody remembers like they first heard about this thing and it's like what is this it's a single board linux computer what is that it's like a little thing i have one here this is a pi 4 credit card sized computer about 40 bucks that can run linux it runs debian or a fork of debian this is the one of the original ones not the very first but uh an early early one it's kind of like a like a younger sister of the ones that most people have these days but i like how it has an rca jack it's like so cool um as well as hdmi uh two usb ports and ethernet and i wanna say this is not the first single board computer right at all there was the chumby board um which even had gpio it ran uh it's a freescale processor it had us multiple usb ports audio ran off of five volts has a little a jaunty little ram chip over here quite cute i even had if you look here this is a vga output connector so you could connect it to not necessarily vga but a tft display so it even had tft built in there's also the long history of pc104 boards right these plug-and-play kind of stackable computer thingies um if you've never had to use this that's really awesome uh congratulate yourself um they were kind of a nightmare i did once get one working and like it took me like three weeks and then i was just like what am i doing and i went and did something else um there's also the beaglebone and the beagleboard also came before the raspberry pi all kind of coming out around 2010 right and the thing about the linux the thing about the raspberry pi single board computer and why it won is basically was just 40 bucks like nobody could compete with the price and the simplicity of it and that's kind of important because as we talk about why things happened it's basically two things simplicity and price those are like really the like power is not that important it's capabilities as long as you fulfilled the simplicity and price prerequisites um you know but given that it was really sweet that the raspberry pi had ethernet i think that was also a big thing because it was and usb you could plug in a usb wi-fi dongle you could connect to the internet you could do internet projects very easily and very cheaply um in fact chances are you probably have a raspberry pi at home it's running like a you know home assistant or maybe it's running pie hole or you've got it doing some uh you know data logging thing for you or it's emulating video games uh that you play with your kids very popular because they're you know five to thirty five dollars you can buy them at um computer stores you can buy them online you can even get them on amazon so one thing that's kind of fun like i love this fun fact this is from liz the uh she's the co-founder co-founder of the raspberry pi foundation um and the director of communications and some people said that why is the raspberry pi called what it is and she's like well raspberry is kind of a pun on apple but the pie stands for python and it was interesting to me that when the raspberry pi came out they basically said the official language of the raspberry pi is python and they have scratch which is a beginner block-based programming language but they really pushed python python is like the way you were expected to program this and given that you had a 700 megahertz arm cortex you know a7 or whatever processor it's totally reasonable to run python as your main language um so going back to okay now we want to rebuild that example that we had with the arduino and the temperature sensor we're going to use a different temperature sensor this is a an i squared c temperature sensor so it uses digital data and analog why because the raspberry pi doesn't have an analog input that's one of the trade-offs that you get it doesn't have as many peripherals as the arduino does in some ways it has digital and it has hdmi but it doesn't have analog and it doesn't really have pwm and and a couple other things and you know one wire you can do but it's a little bit weird um so you you wire it up using the the pins on the on the side of the raspberry pi these little guys here you use little socket wires you plug it in we wrote a library and this library you know is in python 2 and you can see all the pythonisms um and we use logger to keep you know to log what's going on and we wrote a little helper library called adafruit gpio just to do a little bit of the i scored c sm bus i octal stuff which is kind of a pain but on the raspberry pi you log in as a terminal you run sudo apt-get update you install python make sure you're running python and then you have to install rpi gpio and rpi gpio is this library that does memory mapped i memory mapped noodling to basically let you get access to the input and output this is before lib gpiod maybe one day we will all live in a lib gpiod land but pretty much everyone's memory mapping instead you also pip install the library this is the example code it's pretty simple you know there's a little helper function but mostly you import the library you create the sensor you start the sensor you give a little print out and then you just read the sensor data and display it and time sleep in between and uh oops sorry right and um you uh that example comes with the library you go into the example folder you run uh python simple test and you get the temperature out so now you have your temperature data but it's on your raspberry pi computer so if you again want to get this data off of this raspberry pi computer you either have to use ethernet or wi-fi and send it to some service or you can you know open up a socket and have another computer connect to it and somehow you have to transfer the data to somewhere else especially if you want it on like your desktop computer um but you do have that internet capability and what's really cool about python and i'd kind of been writing python before but i never really got into it that much until the raspberry pi is that it's even faster right so you went from a 15 20 minute per program cycle to arduino where you're using a c compiler to write compile upload execute debug loop of about two three four minutes and now we have like an interpreted language that's basically instantaneous you're you're running and saving code and rerunning it in like under five or ten seconds because it's loading instantly into memory there's no compilation step and that's that's really powerful because when we're moving from compiled to interpreted um we get a lot of benefits although of course there's some downsides so let's go back into microcontroller land because we've just been talking about microcomputers right this is a computer it's not a microcontroller it's running a full operating system linux i don't know if you've heard of it and you know you're doing things in the file system and you're installing software and you're running pip and you've got a shell and all that good stuff but when we're talking about you know microcontrollers like say this pico it does not run an operating system right when you when you compile to this your code is running directly on the bare metal which is kind of cool because you have full control over the chip but it also means you have to take care of the whole chip on your own anyways uh you know as about the same time the raspberry pi was coming out folks were saying like well the arduino is cool but like this is like 700 megahertz and it runs like software really fast and that's kind of cool i can do a lot more things with it and um arduino had come out with the deway and the douay i personally i'm not a huge fan of the deway because it had some weird bugs in it uh that drove me a little crazy but one thing that was neat about the deway is it was like just as we had moved from uve prompt chips to enhanced flash chips we are now moving to a next generation of like high performance although i'm sure if you watch this 10 years from now you'll think of this as like a rinky dink chip at the time this was and still is a fairly high performance chip um it's a 32-bit arm cortex so it's 32-bit not 8-bit so it can process data much faster it's running at 84 megahertz compared to an arduino running at 16. it has a grand total of half a megabyte of flash up to 100 kilobyte of sram okay like look obviously this is not a ton but it's you know easily an order to magnitude more than the original arduino that we were talking about in 2005 or even the enhanced flash pick 16 f-84 from um you know back in in 2000 2001. um so this is the the chip that was used in the arduino so if you look at the slides you can compare uh between the two i mean they're totally different processes totally different generations it's not fair to compare them this one came you know a decade before um but now we're talking about chips that are you know they're they're kind of getting to like your old 286 or 386 speed right like even a turbo button here which is pretty much why i picked this image right you know you think about your 486 or 386 running it 66 megahertz well this is running at 84 and it's got you know doesn't have as much ram because it doesn't have to run a whole operating system but you know it is a 32-bit processor and it's running quite fast and so when you have extra cycles you can spend them in different ways um so instead of running code where you're literally just controlling every single command as it's executed people started using real-time operating systems now free rtos did not get invented around now this is actually from 2000 also and they were meant to be used on microcomputers however people started using them on microcontrollers because you had enough memory and enough flash that you had overhead available to run a real-time operating system and so in 2012 to 2014 there was this amazing like cambrian explosion of interpreted languages running on microcontrollers and i don't exactly know why other than i imagine the chips just got powerful enough and cheap enough and and everyone sort of started seeing it's also like you know when somebody beats like um a sport like a 500 meter sprint like the first person to like get it under like a minute or whatever then everybody else is like whoa if that's possible i can do it too and then the um the world record starts dropping even more right so this i don't know that this is the first one there's probably other um embedded interpreted languages boards that came before it but the esporino was pretty early so this is 2012 and this board i also don't know why these boards came in these kind of funky rectangular shapes but i'm digging it this board is running uh sorry this board is by gordon williams who also uh headed this project i'm sure there's other people as well um and this board is running on a microcontroller that's an stm32f1 lovely series of chips again 256 to 512k flash 32-bit 72 megahertz right it's this kind of class of microcontroller and it's fast enough uh that you can run javascript on it and it's not a full implementation of javascript but it's enough that you can sort of have the javascript feeling and you can script your microcontroller i'm sure that gordon has awesome talks and presentations so if you want more detail about the implementation i'd check the website for esporino but this is sort of what it looks like he has a really cool ide that runs in the browser um you're now running code that is interpreted this is not compiled and when you run it you like click execute and it uploads the board and again instead of that three to four minute compile upload verify run uh debug loop it's it's shrunk down to the speed of python on the raspberry pi it's like seconds basically five to ten seconds um there was also the tesl which i thought was really cool because this is a really high powered microcontroller but it is a microcontroller with a lot of ram and a lot of flash and they did like a very large subset of uh javascript running on a microcontroller even had wi-fi at all these expansion ports um this is the tesla team i just love the exuberant positivity of this team they're smiling so so wide they love their hardware so much um they're using a uh lpc 1830 um you'll see definitely these are all arm cortex chips arm just did a really good job getting low cost high power microcontrollers out to people around this time this is an m3 running at 180 megahertz um with 200k of sram but even put more sram on it uh and similarly they you know you you run you know basically javascript on it and in your command line you even tell it what to do but yeah it's basically javascript running on a chip that can also connect to the internet and download stuff and then of course there's micropython uh this is the what's our photo we found at the pi board view 1.1 there's probably a v 1.0 before then also running on an stm32f405 um this is by damien george who has been doing so much with micropython and recently completed uh the pico port for micro python congratulations on that release this week um but he sort of looked at these javascript boards i'm assuming and said i want to do the same thing for python and the cool thing is he didn't know that it wasn't possible so he he did it and it turns out it was possible a miniaturized version of python 3 running on a microcontroller um and you get python code and you're running like python 3 code but it's running on a microcontroller to blink an led this is like the the first example that you run um for blinking an led and um it really kicked off because and i'm not saying that people don't run esperino or even tessel those are still alive but again it was the price and the um simplicity of it that i think made micropython really you know branch out and cover the world because when they did a kickstarter i think a year or two after the pipeboard came out or maybe a year afterwards they went and um the kickstarter was to port it to the esp8266 a you know basically one to two dollar wi-fi enabled microcontroller that's a 10 silica chip and again just fast enough and just barely good enough to run micro python and this was like a huge success and we promoted it and we did some tutorials for it and it was awesome in fact if you look you probably have this badge which is running um the next generation the esp32 the next generation chip and it's also running micro python on this wi-fi enabled microcontroller all on your badge which is like super neat it even has two screens why two screens i don't know but why not right um and you can program it um from the command line you can you know get files from wi-fi and save the file system it's like people have done such cool stuff with this because it's so easy it's so fast to get started and going because of that very short iteration loop of you know you don't compile you don't upload you just write and execute wear and execute okay so let's talk about business and disruption and having fun because i think that this is something that engineers they know it but they don't realize it and that's there's you know if you go to business school you get an mba or something you know you're gonna read uh clayton christensen's book the innovator's dilemma and it's actually kind of a funny book um not i mean it's a good book overall but it's really funny because it's about hard drives and they talk about like these massive hard drives but they end before ssd or flash memory comes up so like they don't even realize that the innovator's dilemma is going to be like innovated like 15 times over by the time you read it but anyways you should read it because it is a good book but basically it says look it doesn't matter if there's something that has a wide market as long as there's something that's cheaper and does like enough stuff that it's interesting and gets adopted especially the it's less expensive and it's easier to use and performance isn't as important um so as these disk drives in this book were being created um they went from you know super huge to um smaller and smaller and smaller and they weren't as good but it didn't matter because the price and size was improved and so um if you look at something like you know the arduino what was actually innovative about it was not the hardware i mean the hardware was wonderful it's great don't get me wrong it's perfect but the thing is is how easy it was to use comparatively you know you've got this ide and you open it up and you can pretty much just get started writing immediately so if you want to make like these cool led goggles for example um you know we have an arduino kit for it this is something that would be really hard to do without arduino because it's something that cosplayers as beginners want to do they don't want to have an engineering degree they just want to get started or this led tiara like actually kind of a popular project a lot of kids want to build their own led glowing tiara they do not want to go to school and study like stacks and heaps and compiler design and the dragon book and all that stuff they just want to get into having fun right that's the thing it's about having fun with electronics and before there was arduino where the arduino was very disruptive because beforehand it was just like a yak shaving nightmare and it still is right so you know if you're wanting to write code on the raw atmel chip that's on the arduino um you download atmel studio and it's in vs code don't get me wrong it's it's wonderful there's just too many damn buttons and there's too many file menus and there's like so many tabs even i don't like using it and also it's not even available for linux even if you wanted to it's only for windows and then let's say you want to change chips you want to now run something on a msp430 okay well you're gonna have to go into a totally different ide code composer studio for the official way of programming it from ti and xp they also have their own id like thankfully they have them available for all operating systems but it just means that you're suffering in three different operating systems i don't know if that's a really better way of doing it and of course you can always use eclipse um and now there's platform i o and these are all good too but they are still i would not call them super fun they're very powerful but i wouldn't call this fun like you you're happy when you're done but you're not like enjoying the process and i say that as someone who writes like five to ten hours of code a day this is fun right like apple basic is fun you're just getting in there and you're just like doing it and people start you know they say like well you know back in the day computers were like kids were able to program you know computers and all they had was schematics and you had to do assembly and peak and poke and i'm like yeah but they didn't have to deal with eclipse right and if you take that away then maybe it is easier maybe it's the tool chain maybe it's a tool system not the actual programming that's uh complicated um so this is a a sort of a blurb from a uh polygram essay from 2001 and i can't remember the name of it off top of my head but maybe you can google for the first sentence and you'll find it and i read this in 2001 when i was graduating from school and it's an article about lisp and he said the reason that his company was successful was because they wrote their entire application in lisp or this variant um and not in uh you know whatever c or c plus plus language other people are writing web code in and he said the reason was is that we chose the highest level language possible and he says you obviously don't work computers machine code we don't write software for computers and machine code although at the time people writing assembler for microcontrollers because that 16 f84 basically didn't come with a compiler or a free compiler to start he said you should always if if there's no other comparison of course he goes into like performance and you know apis and whatever but all things being equal pick the highest level language you can and why because if you look at like the studies of like you know this one is a compiled studies of how long it takes to solve a string parsing problem you see here pearl and python are at the top c plus plus java and c or at the bottom and it's not necessarily the code it's not the language itself right there's nothing like they all have for loops and if statements and all that good stuff and and you know you print strings and you have to format them um it's that the number of lines of code you write are smaller the smaller the amount of code the faster your development loop i believe that's those are the core elements to making it easy to code because the number of lines you're coding is about the same per hour and what i really like about um micro python and circuit python which we'll talk about is that there's no tool chain at all i actually it just deletes the tool chain completely once you've installed circuit python or micro python you edit a code.pi file for example here and then if you have images or audio like in this project i have a little thing that goes on the internet and finds out how many github stars we have displays the image and plays a coin sound every time we get a new star so please star our repos um it all lives on the disk drive a little bit reminiscent for me of res edit for those who who liked where's edit hacking um when they were kids um and then of course there's chromebooks where you can't even install an ide if you wanted to right so you you have to get rid of the tool chain and getting into the tool chain and being able to delete all the code composer studios and atmel studios has just been it's been glorious um because they're just so complicated and so frustrating to use um another nice thing i like about python is uh you don't have to deal with pointers you don't have stacks and heaps you don't have string parsing problems you don't have a lot of that you get with c or c plus plus again i write five to ten hours of c plus plus a day so i know this uh i use these application this application i write this kind of code i still hate it even if it's efficient it's just it's so scary to write um compared to python where if you divide by zero you don't get a hard fault and your entire mic controller just stops working um instead you get a python interpreter that tells you hey on this line dear sir you made a mistake please fix um the only thing i would like is instead of white space i wish there was brackets um i'm going to bring this up at the next python software foundation meeting and hopefully i can convince them to get rid of white space and use brackets and semicolons instead okay so how does circuit python fit into this and in case you're wondering like what the hell does this have to do with linux we're getting there so around let's see 2015 i think is when the micro bit came out arduino killer but what i really liked it was an arduino shaped thank god right they actually kind of went in a totally different direction the idea was low-cost microcontroller for kids the cheapest possible thing to get people started with programming um that had like these leds on the front and buttons and chances are again you have one of these because like everyone seems to have one of these um and this is on the back and the reason that this was to me really amazing um and inspiring is that chip on the back this this one right here so this chip the nrf51 822 i was familiar with this chip this chip totally sucks what do i mean it's it is a 32-bit arm cortex chip but compared to the chips that were being used for micro python this was this came up a little bit after micropython and esperino and the tessel if you remember those were like running at 72 megahertz and they had 200k of ram and they were just like these massive chips and this one was like really dinky by comparison um even at the most expensive variant you only got 32k of ram and that's like not very much i mean it is compared to like 16 f-84 with like 68 bytes of ram but it's still not very much um especially if you want to do uh bluetooth stuff as well and so that was really interesting to me because it was almost the same specifications as the sam d21 chip and you're like okay well i don't i'm not even like you're like why even keep track of what these chips are the reason that this chip is interesting it was used in the latest arduino that had just come out and this arduino which you know looks like the uh the original arduino uno it was running this was there kind of the next generation it was the um first armcore you know 32-bit microcontroller based arduino and i was like oh my god it is technically possible that we could get micropython to run on this the only reason that i didn't end up going with esperino or javascript is because micropython was kind of the first thing to prove that it could run on something um this underpowered compared to what the tesla was running for example because i looked at that and i was like oh well it's obviously you could run javascript on a microcontroller but um what you're talking about there is is a 99 board i like something that was more closer again to 30 dollars um this is where scott comes in this is a photo of scott with blinka the mascot we we made a gigantic puppet um we know uh there's a woman in new york who works on the muppet show well she's not we can't say that she works on a common puppeteering show that folks are familiar with and uh we hired her to make a puppet it's not a muppet because that's trademarked um so we sent him an email uh because we'd seen him on the show and tell and he was working with this chip a lot and he started a hardware company and then realized he didn't really want to do that anymore and so we emailed and we said hey uh we have this idea right he's like okay what do you want to do and basically said look can you just like port micro python to this new chip that the arduino is using and why because if you have people well let me go back if you have people who have these arduinos already it's going to be a lot easier to overcome that activation energy and get them to use circuit python or micropython because they already have something that's arduino it's not as scary right whereas um a lot of these boards this the esp later this is a much later photo but when this first came out the tesla and esprino and pi board you had to have specialized hardware to do it whereas now it was more generic um so we actually started making hardware that could run micro python and it was you could use arduino or microphone i think it can go back and forth just kind of cool and we started writing libraries um this is code that would let you use hardware um and this is actually when i had um a big change of heart because basically i looked at our github repo and it's i took a screenshot today you know 1500 repositories um but it was still like over a thousand at the time and i was like oh my god i can't i can't have so many repositories i have to be careful here because um i have 400 500 arduino libraries this is the arduino library listing and it says 476 results for adafruit and i was starting to have you know three libraries per this temperature sensor that i talked about i'd have one for arduino i had one for python which was for the raspberry pi we mentioned that would run in the command line and i would have one for you know micropython or circuit python and i really really did not want to have that 450 turn into an additional 450 and then another 450 because my inbox is already toxic wasteland um and we had already written about 30 libraries of our most popular boards for python that's the raspberry pi you know python 2 2.7 and i realized like i really wanted to combine at least the python and micropython together and by the time we kind of got to this point it was like a year or two later scott really wanted to have a unified interface and kind of came up with these are not like the hard and fast rules rules are meant to be broken but we wanted to use mass storage for file management because using a command line tool was actually too complicated for some people um and another thing is that if you had a chromebook you might not be able to install command line tools at all so mass storage is kind of the only universal you know interface for usb that every computer runs um even serial ports aren't always easy to open on a chromebook um we wanted to have a consistent api across all ports so any board that had circuit python micropython it would always that code would always run on each one and we wanted to make sure that it was a pure subset of c python even if that meant that it was simpler and slower and that was so that we could have code that runs on raspberry pi or microcontrollers the same driver code and this is when we actually decide to split the fork because this is something that we felt really strongly about because i did not want to maintain another 1000 libraries and micropython folks were like well this is you know we have our own direction and so we said okay how about we we fork it we rename ourselves to circuit python it's the same underlying python uh code underneath but that api level is going to be a little bit different because these were really important to us so for example time what time is it i'm about 15 minutes so um on circuit python on the top when you import time and you look at all the you know functions available in that module you see local time instruct and sleep and then if i go down to my computer and i run python 3 and i import time and do the same thing you'll see i have more stuff i have process time i have time zones i have ascii time alt zone but everything in circuit python is a strict subset there is no code that you should be able to run in circuit python that would not also run on python 3. and that was really a good idea because by this point there was like a lot of raspberry pi computers because raspberry pi kept coming out with new ones and this is like even this is 2018 it's even worse now right it's not worth better there's even more amazing whereas we buy computers and this is when uh you know it's like there's like the teenage mutant teenage ninja me teenage ninja mutant turtles whatever i can't say it anymore um and that was a really popular tv show and all the kids were watching it and so like all these other animation studios were like oh my god we need to have some sort of like teenage like amphibian like fighting ninja show and so there's like battle toads and there's like street sharks and so that's just like the battletoads zone of single board computers because raspberry pi was so successful that suddenly everybody that had chips was making single board computers this is a banana pie this is an orange pie like they have kind of the fruit names really popular this is onion io they didn't go with the pie but it's still food based um you have odroid and you've got tinkerboard this is from asus um basically it's a jaunty angle here um you've got the nvidia came out with their own uh jetson nano and um this is just like the categorizations on wikipedia of like there's like 54 categories companies making single board computers and each one easily makes 10. i mean there are hundreds and hundreds of single board computers and um each one of them had like kind of slightly different ways to interface with the gpio like they're all winning like armbian or debian kinda somewhere running ubuntu but they're all kind of running mainline linux um but then if you actually wanted to twiddle those gpio pins the the pins that would replace the parallel port it's like a little different and like this one you can do the pip this one you have to like download this like douching k33 slash orange pie and then like set up install from inside of it and um i want to give credit to periphery because among others they're one of the few libraries that tried really hard to say hey everybody let's like have one standard for all of these hundreds of boards so people don't have to install a different package from some random ass github repo and we use periphery actually they're uh they're pretty cool but then we have these other weird boards we have um the ft-232h this is a device that you plug it into usb and it gives you gpio connected to a computer so um it's a banging usb device and you can use lib usb with it and so you can connect it to your computer and then on your computer you run python 3 and then you can blink leds for example so you're running python but not on a raspberry pi and not on a microcontroller it's on your computer and you're controlling hardware um so for example uh eprom chip you know you want to program this eeprom chip it's a 512 ke prompt you can't fit that on an arduino but if you have it on your file system it makes a lot more sense it's quite easy to program it using a ftdi adapter so we've got microcontrollers with low resources and lots of hardware single board computers like the raspberry pi medium resources and some hardware like a lot but not everything and then desktop computers which are like the most powerful they have access to everything but low hardware and we wanted to make this all work together so why not come up with a new standard why not indeed and so this is where tux and blinka the love story begins they become best friends hi wonderful graphics so blanka started as circuit python running on the samd21 these microcontroller boards but we wrote so many libraries that we decided let's make a way for all of our libraries for all these sensors and these leds and displays and motors to work with anybody so we wrote adafruit blinker which is a way of using the hardware api from circuit python which remember we defined as a strict subset of c python so you could run all of these sensors and devices on um any computer so we started with the raspberry pi because of course it's the most popular um and it's actually interesting you'd think like well how hard can it be actually turns out that there's like four different types of raspberry pi that you have to deal with there's the compute modules have a lot of pins the rev1 and web 2 have different pin outs and then the 40 pin is a different so it turns out like even even just dealing with one subset of the single board computer market is uh is different um and then it's funny as i was writing this i'd like this issue came in how do i run this on nano pi well you know i want to run your raspberry pi projects on a nano pi which is just a pi clone and uh it turns out like yeah we have uh support for the nano pi too and we have support for computers using the um ftdi converter chip as well so if you go to circuitpython.org blinka you will see that we have banana pies beaglebones dragon boards clockwork pies jets and nanos 60 different boards altogether that are supported with this library that let you do sensors gpio pwm analog inputs all equivalently with the same code over this entire family um and it's cool because we actually have people submitting new boards like a couple days ago somebody um you know sent over a pr for the lubin cat imx six ull what is it i don't know but it's supported now um the orange pi zero plus board thanks twa 127 and then we are also adding uh board support maker melissa is is works on the team and she has been adding um support for uh like the nanopineo what is it i don't know i mean i have these boards there's just like there's just like hundreds of them they're like super cute these little linux boards um you know some of them are only ten dollars or so uh some of them have gigabit ethernet whatever you want so the upshot is is that once i had that fear of the oh my god i'm gonna have three libraries per device removed i was able to then um actually go in and really start developing libraries and so we have 283 libraries so far some of them are hardware specific but about 250 of them i think are going to be generic enough that run on everything and these are like oled screens and sensors and uh nrf that's nfc card readers and and all that good stuff pretty much every every electronic device you'd want leds like neopixels all that we also have community contributions which is awesome um i want you know i want to make sure oh sorry and at the bottom right there's also people there's like a group of people from the community that help us manage prs and issues and there's people who are submitting their own libraries so there's a a library for the mitsutoyo digimatic calipers i guess you can read data off of it or there's for dynamics these are servos that are used in high-end robotics somebody submitted a library that uses the standard api um and it's cool we have a really powerful community of a lot of people who come in with different backgrounds some are really into linux some are into microcontrollers some are into ham radio it's neat what you're seeing what people can do with this once they're free to move from chip to chip from platform to platform reducing that support burden but squeezing down that iteration loop that's what's really important to me um okay so there was this thai restaurant and it closed a long long time ago it wasn't it wasn't like a covered thing but they had this dish called duck three ways and i loved it it was like they had a duck and it was like some duck breasts and some good feet and then there was like some skin and i'm gonna do deck three ways i'm not gonna do it live because i've learned my lesson not to i don't want to stress out the organizers but i did take screenshots of connecting to a temperature and humidity sensor three ways and showing how it's the same so it's actually kind of boring it's the same kind of duck quack or something um to start with the pico this just came out this is a microcontroller from the raspberry pi foundation um it's got an incredible large amount of ram it's running at 200 megahertz but it's actually only a cortex m0 chip it's actually kind of designed specifically or it's optimized for running circuit python or micropython which i think is awesome so you can download and install circuit python by dragging and dropping a file onto the chip which shows up as a disk drive and this morning i wired it up to this sensor which i have somewhere here on my desk uh ht aht20 temperature and humidity reader you wire up power ground and then the two data lines um for for data transmission again as circuit python it shows up like a disk drive uh on the disk drive i drag over aht zero dot pi the the library file which defines how you read data over r square t and turn that into temperature readings and humidity readings um there's some you know f7sd and the meta never index and trashes that's the mac stuff that i'm sure you're familiar with boot.out.text is sort of like the message for microcontrollers it tells you like that when you boot up it kind of gives you a little bit of output telling it to state so you can debug if something happened on boot thus device is a helper that makes it it has some macros that makes it easy it's in python as well but it's in a folder and then you open up code.py in your favorite text editor like moo or you can use really any text editor i also use adam sometimes or people use vs studio or vs code and in this case uh the code you import the time you import uh board and bus io in the sensor this is plain python code for those who may not be familiar with it you create an i squared c bus device saying i want to communicate digitally over these two pins you instantiate the sensor and then you just read the temperature and relative humidity and at the bottom you get the temperature and humidity printed out in degree c and percentage wonderful okay so great so now i have that code is running on the pico um but now i'm going to pick out my raspberry pi 4 it's kind of the newest raspberry pi model and in this case there's no download and said you follow the installation instructions here we have a shell script that you can run but basically you have to enable i squared c and you have to install python 3 and all that all that stuff that you're used to when you're installing software if you've not installed python 3 before you wire it up again connect to the gpio power ground to data pins you pip install the library i already have but you can see all the dependencies are managed for you uh including uh trying to say blink is here somewhere i don't know maybe i already have it installed oh yeah here it is blinker gets installed first has all these dependencies including that rpi gpio um i cat the example code which is essentially the same as the the previous code except there's a default i've squared c port and then same thing i print out temperature and humidity i run it from the shell and it prints out to standard output and finally i want to run it on windows i have my windows computer i grab my mcp2221 which is like the ftdi board it just happens to be the one i like more because it's it's so petite um in my windows command prompt i pip install the same library that i installed on the raspberry pi so it gets all my dependencies for me uh i open up notepad which is my preferred editor in windows i don't know it's just convenient i paste in that exact same code i open up my command prompt and i go to the desktop and i run that code and the same exact output shows up same code same output on a microcontroller on a microcomputer or a desktop computer and so what i think is neat is that circuit python while we originally sort of designed it as the easiest way to program microcontrollers we wanted to shrink that loop of you know take away the compile upload to make it edit run edit run make it very fast because it's interpreted and you can do that it turns out that it's actually kind of the best way to program electronics in general so by using blinka with circuit python circuit python sort of becomes like it's a language yes based on python but it's more than that it's more like an api and that api can be implemented in c python that allows you to experiment and write code and interface with hardware on any device single board computers desktop sweating and the operator operating system as well as microcontroller boards so especially for those of you who have linux running on your favorite little funky single board computer if we don't support your board in blinka please open up an issue we will try to get one or you can follow our guides we have on how to implement it yourself we have a tutorial on how to add the detection code which is actually kind of the hardest part to telling which single board computer you're running and then defining all the pins and peripherals so that blinker knows what to look for and can make sure that the code runs smoothly on your favorite single board computer thank you i finished just on time thank you very much limo that was an excellent journey of microcontrollers i know i took you on a place and then now you're back to where you started it was great watching all the commentary along the side and the chat stream there was lots of really excited people talking about all the different things that they've done with their arduinos and microcontrollers and raspberry pi's yeah have you have you built electronic projects with arduino i've done a little bit myself but nowhere near as much as people like our swag badge team um so i can give you an update on your question about why there's only two screens on the swag badge um they said that it's simply because they didn't have time to do six screens on there oh okay that's a good reason yeah next next year six six screens maybe like a cube that'd be kind of fun like a little yeah that would be pretty fun to play three-dimensional badges that's where it's at all right well thanks so much i you know we don't have question answer of course for the keynote you told me but um folks can come by our discord um and they can yeah here's what i think i'm going to do i'm going to stop no you stopped my screen i've got to share no i have to stop my thing what's exciting i'm going to share this window okay so if you could pop up the thing so if you go to circuitpython.org and you can uh read all about it and all you know you can click on blinka if you want to see all these boards but if you go to contributing um and you look here okay nice and big there is a discord so if you're on discord and i think almost everybody watching is probably a discord because i think you have to go here um you can click on this link to go to the adafruit discord this is an invite and then we're in the circuit python channel and you can ask us all sorts of questions um because i'm sure people have all sorts of detailed questions and we have a community we also do weekly meeting mondays at 2pm eastern almost every monday except when there's a holiday uh you can come by and you can be a total newbie it's it's a voice chat but also text chat for those who don't uh like to do voice excellent okay cool that's really good thank you very much limo all right thank you thanks for coming along to lca thanks for having me