(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2017 PyCon.de conference).
(See also yesterday’s talk)
There’s a lot of power and functionality in microcontrollers nowadays. But they are harder and harder to program. Wouldn’t python be a great fit? It allows beginners to do things they couldn’t do before.
Micropython is a powerful and modern language with a large community, especially intended for very constrained/embedded systems.
If you program for embedded systems, you really have to know the hardware. This is different from “regular” programming.
Micropython started with a succesful kickstarter. In 2016, the BBC used it for 7 million school children. There was also a kickstarter for porting it to the super cheap ESP8266 chip.
Fun facts:
ESA (European space agency) is sponsoring development to make it even more reliable. They’re planning to use it in satellites.
It is certified for use in traffic management devices in the UK!
There were some pyboards and people could play with it. Very nice is that you don’t need an IDE: you can just connect to the board and type around on the python prompt.
Photo explanation: some 1:87 scale figures on my model railway (under construction).
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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