Skip to content

Blog

  • in Python
  • 1 min read

March 2022 Update

I’ve been hip deep in podcast related stuff for the last two months, but with the first two episodes out I can come up for air.

I don’t know what good looks like yet, but I’m happy with the reception the show has received. The YouTube comments have been nice (what?!) and I’ve received some compliments here and there.

I did build a complete website for FastAPI in that time. It was useful to go through the Talk Python training again and it helped me gain a (slightly) better grasp of asyncio. All the code to manage the episodes (add, edit, and view) is my code. I still need to get a better handle on SQLAlchemy and how and what type the results are returned as, but it’s working. I’m sure I missed some type hints, too, and I’m really enjoying working with those, though I need some better discipline.

All season one episodes are now recorded and edited and will be released over the next four weeks. Season 2 is in the planning stage and I’ve invited all the guests, and we’ll start recording in just a couple of weeks. I’m enjoying meeting folks from the community, it definitely gets me out of comfort zone and I’m learning a ton.

And don't forget to subscribe to the show - add this RSS feed to your app in your favorite podcast app.

  • in Python
  • 2 min read

The CircuitPython Show Progress

I’m about ten days away from the first episode of The CircuitPython Show dropping. Saying I’m a nervous wreck right now might be an understatement.

Five of the six episodes have been recorded and sent off to the sound engineering to make them sound good. (I’m using the same sound engineer as Talk Python to Me, how about that for a referral?!). I’ve received one of the episodes back and it sounds good. I shared it with my best friend, who agreed, and he’s not even in to CircuitPython and microcontrollers. Paying for sound production is worth it to level the audio and remove all those “Umms” and pauses is worth every penny.

I’ll be posting each episode on YouTube and I’m doing the editing for that. In other words, it will be a much more of a rough cut on YouTube and I recommend listening to the show as a podcast.

I’ve already learned a lot in just a few episodes. This TedX talk sums it well: “Shut up and get out of the way”. I just need to let the guests talk and I need to remove the extra words. The other big thing I need to work on is the ending, it’s… a little abrupt, let’s just say.

I would say every episode has gone really well. The guests have been engaging and the conversation has just flowed.

The website is pretty much done. I can edit the episode details, show notes, and transcripts and store them all in a database. I can edit them, but still having some issues with how it updates the edits. I’ve built the site using FastAPI and the Talk Python training course. I went to Talk Python’s office hours last week, which helped me a ton, and I may need to visit one more time to get this last thing done.

There’s no hurry to getting some of the features up as it’s all behind the scenes stuff, but it would be nice to cross that off the list.

The only other big chunks of work are going through each episode to create the show notes and check the transcripts and also to create and edit the videos for each episode to put up on YouTube. And no, I’m still not used to the sound of my own voice.

What, you haven't subscribed to the show yet in your favorite podcast app? Just add this RSS feed to your app and you'll be ready when the first episode drops in just over a week..

  • in Python
  • 1 min read

The Podcast Has Been Submitted

CircuitPython Show on PocketCasts

I mentioned in my blog post introducing the podcast that I had a lot to do to get the podcast ready. I may have underestimated the amount of work, but progress is being made! The podcast was submitted to all of the major podcast networks today, including PocketCasts (my personal player of choice), Google, Apple Podcasts, and everywhere you'd expect to listen to a show. If you want to add the show manually to your podcast player, here is the link.

This is the thirty second teaser trailer that shares some of the guests who will joining me in Season 1 of the show.

The biggest way to help the show right now is to subscribe to the link or search for the show in your favorite podast player (when it appears), and if you like what you hear after the show debuts, please consider writing a review.

More to come soon!

  • in Python
  • 2 min read

Silver Saucer Progress (January 2022)

When I’m not doing something podcast related, I’m still trying to find time to code.

With the football games in the background, I was able to build off my last post, which would convert an image to Bitmap if I had it.

I made sure I had it today. Using the requests library, I implemented the ability to go get the photo and pass it to Pillow to conversion. The process looks like this:

  1. Request image URL location from Discogs via the authenticated API
  2. Get the request object and write it to disk
  3. Use the object to pass it to Pillow, which converts and saves it.

It was easier than I expected. I have two things to do:

  1. Only download the image if I’m the one logged in
  2. I was only to save it in the default directory, I need to store the the images in the static directory.

I’m not 100% sure the project is going to work. Technically, it will work. But I should really be about 12 feet away from the LED matrix to see the display in the right light. Currently I’m about three feet away and it doesn’t look the best. Looking around my home office, there isn’t a great place put it. I also need to learn how to take better pictures of LEDs.

Those two things plus wiring up MQTT equals done. Getting close now. The pictures look much better in person.

Sugar's Copper Blue album artwork displayed on a 64 by 64 matrix

Sugar's Copper Blue album standing up next to itself displayed on a 64 by 64 matrix

  • in Python
  • 2 min read

Introducing The CircuitPython Show

CircuitPython Show

I’ve decided to start a podcast! The very original show name is The CircuitPython Show, about - you guessed it - CircuitPython! More specifically, about the people and the cool things they're doing with CircuitPython.

The show will be a question and answer style interview podcast. I’m shooting for each episode to be about 30 minutes. I’ll interview a person in (or around) the CircuitPython community and it will give listeners an opportunity to learn more about that person.

I’m still a ways out from releasing episodes. I’m planning on six episodes for season one and I’ve been emailing invites out to potential guests. So far I have three confirmed guests so I still have a little work to do. If you have any guest recommendations or want to be on the show, please let me know! (Really, please!)

I’m brand new to all this and I’m sure it will take me a few episodes to find my “voice”. I’m recording a teaser trailer and already I’m learning how hard this is! But if you’ll stick with me, I’m guessing the episodes will get better as I go along. I've really enjoyed my time in the CircuitPython community, especially the Adafruit Discord channel, and thought there are enough interesting people to make a podcast about those people and their projects.

A special shout-out to Michael Kennedy, host of the Talk Python To Me podcast. When I was considering doing this he took time out of his schedule to answer some questions for me and make some introductions. (And we’re both using Boostrap Dark for our websites, the similarity is unintentional!)

You can find out more at the newly launched website (running FastAPI of course) or follow the show on Twitter, which I recommend as that’s my platform of choice. I’ll probably drop some spoilers and other info on Twitter first.

I’ll blog some more when the teaser trailer is out or I have other news. Until then, I have a lot of work to do…

  • in Python
  • 3 min read

CircuitPython 2022

How cool is this: for the last few years Adafruit asks their community to share their individual goals for the CircuitPython community on the internet. From blogs posts to Twitter to YouTube videos (and more!), community members are encouraged to share their thoughts on what they want to build, features, or around the ecosystem.

I’m still fairly new to the community and my goals are much more modest than some of the others, such as the core developers. But I’ve found the community to be so welcoming and patient I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

So here goes.

A look back at 2021

2021 was the year I got into microcontrollers, CircuitPython, and hardware in general. After having bought a Circuit Playground Express in 2020 and it just sitting in a drawer, I went got into it in a big way in 2021. I purchased a rp2040 Feather, MatrixPortal M4, and an AdaBox subscription, starting with the rp2040 MacroPad. More importantly, I used them!

I learned to solder and bought a 3D printer, which makes playing with microcontrollers even more fun.

I built my MacroPad and started the MacroPad Awesome List - because MacroPads are cool. I love seeing what macros the community has come up with and then borrowing those ideas for my own MacroPad. I also created macros for my CAD program of choice, OnShape. (I’d rather learn and use FreeCad, but I really need a color blind mode).

I tackled my biggest project to date with the Sound Reactive NeoPixels Speaker Stand. This was pretty challenging and I wasted dozens of hours trying to port some sound reactive code from a digital microphone to an analog mic before breaking down and buying a digital microphone, which I just should have done in the first place! I’m very proud of the project and it so cool to look at.

Sound Reactive NeoPixels Speaker Stand

2022 Goals

I have two major goals for 2022 centered around hardware and community.

Hardware

I want to finish my Album Art project. I love that I combine my love of the physical (my record collection) with software (CircuitPython, FastAPI), and hardware (LED matrices with a MatrixPortal). I’ve made significant progress in 2022 already and the next step is integrating MQTT into the project. This is a great way to continue building on my novice Python skills as I learn FastAPI for the website that powers this (and asyncio!) as well as CircuitPython.

I’m looking forward to whatever AdaBox brings. This was my Christmas gift from my partner and I’m excited to see whatever ships next and I’m going to commit to building it right away.

Community

The Adafruit community is wonderful, especially the Discord channel. They’re welcoming to everyone and I get most of my (dumb) questions answered. I want to stay engaged and help out others where I can, if possible.

I have a goal of going on Show & Tell again once my Album Art project is done.

Lastly, reading through some of the other folks posting their 2022 thoughts, I want to reach out to Jeff Epler who shared that there might be room for further improvement to ” Continue to help people grow into the roles of reviewer and contributor. Maybe I can put my former experience in writing both documentation and articles for GNOME to use.

That’s it! A lot to look forward to in 2022. I think it’s so cool that Adafruit invites community members to share their goals for the year.

  • in Python
  • 2 min read

LED Matrix Progress

Now Working in CircuitPython!

When we last left our hero, he was unable to get a 8k image to load over the internet and display an image on the MatrixPortal and 64x64 LED….

I decided to take a different tack and I ordered a Matrix Bonnet for the Raspberry Pi from Digikey (Adafruit was out of stock). Let's just say that didn't work at all and I have reason to believe it’s the Bonnet after trying it on two different Raspberry Pi 2s and a Pi Zero 2.

I don’t remember what I was doing this morning, but I was back to playing with the matrices and the MatrixPortal. Danh in the Adafruit Discord, who had already helped me previously by recommending ImageMagick for my project, helped me out again. He shared a code sample making it easy to switch the MatrixPortal from read / write to read only, as only it or a computer should write to it at a time. I accidentally reset my MatrixPortal this morning and wiped it. I had some regular Python code to write the image to disk, so I tried it out on the MatrixPortal and what do you know - it worked!

I was able to initialize the network, connect to my web server, download the 64x64 image, write it to disk, and display it on the matrix.

That was a pleasant surprise, so now I’m on to the next step: converting the JPEG image from Discogs to a tiny bitmap that can be displayed in CircuitPython.

I wasn’t sure if I could use ImageMagick in Python and a couple search engine queries later I was using the Pillow library.

It’s this easy:

from PIL import Image


img = Image.open("cash2.jpg")

new_img = img.resize((64, 64))
rgb_img = new_img.convert('P')

rgb_img.save('cash2.bmp')

It takes the image, in this example the cover art to one of Johnny Cash’s American Recordings albums that I had saved as cash2.jpg locally and converted it to a tiny bitmap. I transferred it up to my web server and it works! Here is the Man in Black himself in his 8 bit glory:

Johnny Cash Album Cover

It’s exciting to have solid progress. Now I need to integrate the Pillow code into FastAPI. After that is a big chunk of work in figuring out how to get MQTT to work, but more on that later.

  • in Python
  • 3 min read

The Right Tool for the Right Job

With silversaucer.com now up and running with about half the functionality, I’ve turned my attention to try and displaying a bitmap on the Adafruit matrices.

I have two 32x64 matrices and have soldered my Adafruit Matrix Portal so it can display a 64x64 image. The first thing I learned was that the bitmap’s size correlates directly to the matrix. Thanks to Dan in Adafruit’s Discord server, I discovered the ImageMagick library can handle turning any image into a bitmap with a couple command line arguments. I ran through some random albums, downloaded the artwork and converted about half a dozen of them to bitmaps. They’re so cute and tiny!

64X64 bitmap of the album Beautiful Garbage by Garbage

And it looks like this:

Beautiful Garbage on the 64 x 64 Matrix

I’ve spent most of the week trying to do this. I can display a 64x64 bitmap from the filesystem, I can do a slideshow and display multiple bitmaps, but the one thing I can’t do: download and display over the internet. I’m not even able to download it, save it to disk, and then display it. One of the challenges of working with CircuitPython is staying within the memory limits as it’s a microcontroller, not a full blown computer like a Raspberry Pi is.

I’m trying to do the following:

  1. Parse the Discogs JSON to get the URL to the album’s cover art. (You must be authenticated to get a link to artwork).
  2. Take the image and convert it to a bitmap. ImageMagick can do this, so I need to save the jpg to the filesystem and then convert it and save it again (or display it in memory).
  3. Send a link to the image or bitmap to my local network to the device powering the LED Matrix.
  4. Display the bitmap on the LED Matrix

Even with almost 40k free, I run out of memory trying to download and display an 8k bitmap. I’ve tried to stream it without any luck. None of the CircuitPython libraries (image load seem to work no matter how I call it over the network. A few folks helped me out in Discord with some pointers, especially around showing how much memory is available which was super helpful, but no luck.

If there is one lesson I have learned since trying to port the sound reactive code for my speaker stand in trying to go analog instead of digital, is use the right tool for the right job. I spent dozens of hours tearing apart CircuityPython code and was never able to make it work. After spending a few days on this, I’m not going to make that mistake again.

If CircuitPython can’t display the image easily, let’s try a Raspberry Pi. I still have a bunch of them just lying around and the Matrix Bonnet is only $15, so I put in an order to Digikey yesterday. (Both of us being in Minnesota, their products get to me quickly).

Now I have a couple more design decisions to make. What kind of MQTT message do I want to send to my Pi locally? The image link? Convert the image to a bitmap and save on my DigitalOcean droplet or on my local Pi?

Longer term I’m leaning towards storing all this data in a database. The Discogs API seems a touch slow when returning a random album, and this would speed it up considerably, especially when loading and displaying an image. More updates next week after the Pi bonnet comes.

  • in Python
  • 2 min read

December 2021 update and next steps

Now that I’ve semi deployed Silver Saucer, with working SSL, it’s time to think about what’s next as the year comes to an end.

I can either start working on the “Choose an album” functionality or I can start working on the IOT / image piece.

The “Choose” uses similar methods to the random functionality, but first it must return a bunch of lists and then display them in a drop down box. The user chooses what they want to play, hits submit, and that artwork appears. I need to build the methods to return the various lists and decide how many choices and what happens with each one on POST.

I don’t have Javascript installed, so one option is to take the HTMX course offered by Talk Python for interactive drop down menus.

Either way, some research and some work to do.

The second option I thought was going to be a lot easier than it turned out to be. I know the image URL location from the Discogs API, now I need to pass that to the MatrixPortal and 64x64 LED Matrix display and draw it.

I’ve spent most of the last two days trying to wrap my head around displayio and other drawing libraries. First, the LEDs only support bitmaps, and those have strict rules. ImageMagick has a convert tool built in to help with converting images at the command line. I can convert them, and display part of them, but I haven’t figured out how to display them at 64x64x yet, and that’s been most of the last two days.

But even before I know which image to draw, I need to send a message from the SilverSaucer.com server to the MatrixPortal. I’ve successfully installed MQTT using SSL (which also took a good chunk of all day Sunday) to do that. Now I just need to code the subscriber portion in the MatrixPortal and add the push in the web app. “Just”.

So that’s where I’m at. I need to pick one and stay with it as I’ve been kind of jumping around as I get stuck. And I’m very stuck, but writing things down does bring a greater clarity for what needs to be done.

  • in Python
  • 3 min read

The Right Tool for the Right Job

With silversaucer.com now up and running with about half the functionality, I’ve turned my attention to try and displaying a bitmap on the Adafruit matrices.

I have two 32x64 matrices and have soldered my Adafruit Matrix Portal so it can display a 64x64 image. The first thing I learned was that the bitmap’s size correlates directly to the matrix. Thanks to Dan in Adafruit’s Discord server, I discovered the ImageMagick library can handle turning any image into a bitmap with a couple command line arguments. I ran through some random albums, downloaded the artwork and converted about half a dozen of them to bitmaps. They’re so cute and tiny!

I’ve spent most of the week trying to do this. I can display a 64x64 bitmap from the filesystem, I can do a slideshow and display multiple bitmaps, but the one thing I can’t do: download and display over the internet. I’m not even able to download it, save it to disk, and then display it. One of the challenges of working with CircuitPython is staying within the memory limits as it’s a microcontroller, not a full blown computer like a Raspberry Pi is.

I’m trying to do the following: 1. Parse the Discogs JSON to get the URL to the album’s cover art. (You must be authenticated to get a link to artwork). 2. Take the image and convert it to a bitmap. ImageMagick can do this, so I need to save the jpg to the filesystem and then convert it and save it again (or display it in memory). 3. Send a link to the image or bitmap to my local network to the device powering the LED Matrix. 4. Display the bitmap on the LED Matrix

Even with almost 40k free, I run out of memory trying to download and display an 8k bitmap. I’ve tried to stream it without any luck. None of the CircuitPython libraries (image load seem to work no matter how I call it over the network. A few folks helped me out in Discord with some pointers, especially around showing how much memory is available which was super helpful, but no luck.

If there is one lesson I have learned since trying to port the sound reactive code for my speaker stand in trying to go analog instead of digital, is use the right tool for the right job. I spent dozens of hours tearing apart CircuityPython code and was never able to make it work. After spending a few days on this, I’m not going to make that mistake again.

If CircuitPython can’t display the image easily, let’s try a Raspberry Pi. I still have a bunch of them just lying around and the Matrix Bonnet is only $15, so I put in an order to Digikey yesterday. (Both of us being in Minnesota, their products get to me quickly).

Now I have a couple more design decisions to make. What kind of MQTT message do I want to send to my Pi locally? The image link? Convert the image to a bitmap and save on my DigitalOcean droplet or on my local Pi?

Longer term I’m leaning towards storing all this data in a database. The Discogs API seems a touch slow when returning a random album, and this would speed it up considerably, especially when loading and displaying an image. More updates next week after the Pi bonnet comes.

blog/silversaucer