Patten Studio features Flagscape, the 15’ kinetic sculpture installed last spring on the corner of 42nd Street and 6th Avenue in New York.

… We wanted to take a deeper dive into the technical work that brought Flagscape together. We sat down and had a chat with the design team to talk about the plot twists and the “discoveries” we made (i.e. surprises) while working on this project, and the clever engineering our team pulled off to build a 15’ tall kinetic artwork with 6 unique rotational axes that spin 360° 24 hours a day 365 days a year and never collide.

The resulting design decision was to balance each panel on a bent tapered tube that would resemble an abstracted tree branch. “Something I learned designing the tubes is that you can’t really bend and taper hollow metal at the same time,” shares Design Engineer Doreen Chin.

To get around this, the poles were fabricated in parts that were then welded together; the bottom part got bent, and the top part got the taper. Because there’s only 4″ of buffer between Flagscape’s panels, Patten Studio worked with a specialty metal fabricator to get the bend radii perfect, using CNCed templates to check the dimensions.

Read about the build process and the studio is at https://www.pattenstudio.com.

Check out the livestream right here inside this product page you won’t want to miss it because there will be a HUGE DISCOUNT during the show!

Tune in for:

• • John Park’s latest product pick
  • Learn how to use it
  • Live Demo

The live video will also be on YouTube LIVE, Twitch, Periscope (Twitter) and Facebook. LIVE TEXT CHAT IS HERE in the Adafruit Discord chat! Come on into the chat to participate in the conversation!!

Every Tuesday @ 4pm ET/1pm PT!

This is a scientific BCD calculator that uses binary-coded decimals, the same internal number format HP used in its scientific calculators going back to the 1970s. It represents every decimal digit as a 4-bit nibble, which means perfect decimal accuracy, no floating-point conversion errors, and an architecture that is genuinely shaped by the problem it solves.

To make that work cleanly, we also design a custom CPU that thinks in nibbles too. It runs on an Altera Cyclone II FPGA, synthesized with Quartus, simulated with Verilator and ModelSim, and debugged through a Qt-based desktop prototype that also compiles to WebAssembly if you want to run it in a browser. Several tools, several moving parts – all built in stages and tested at each one.

Across ten chapters, you will follow full arc: the architectural decisions and tradeoffs, the numerical algorithms (addition, multiplication, CORDIC for trig, logarithms), the custom CPU design and its 12-bit instruction set, a hand-written two-pass assembler in Python, the microcode that runs on that CPU, a scripting layer for high-level key functions, and finally the physical board with its battery, display, and keyboard. Each piece depends on the last, so we build them in order and test them before moving on because a calculator that returns wrong answers is considerably worse than a calculator that returns no answers at all.

Check it out on Baltazar Studios.

While it is in the name, you don’t actually need a Raspberry Pi to protect yourself from ads. Pi-hole will run on any hardware that meets the minimal requirements and is running one of the many supported operating systems. Switch and Click uses Docker to turn an old computer into an ad-blocker for the whole network.

Pi-hole is THE go-to way to block ads across every device on your network, and it turns out you don’t even need a Raspberry Pi to run it. Here’s how it went for me.

Be on Reddit next Thursday 21st May, 3–5pm BST to see Eben Upton (CEO), James Adams (CTO of Hardware Engineering), and Gordon Hollingworth (CTO of Software Engineering) at Raspberry Pi. They will answer your questions, with a focus on industrial and embedded use of Raspberry Pi.

Between the three, they will cover the full stack, so bring whatever you’ve got; board-level hardware questions, software and OS questions, the Compute Modules, RP2040/RP2350, real-time performance, interfacing with industrial protocols, or broader questions.

See more on Reddit. Via Raspberry Pi Forums.

NEW PRODUCT – Machined Red Aluminum Servo Arm – 1.75″ Long

If you’ve bought a servo from us, you probably got a bunch of plastic add-ons that you can snap onto the servo’s rotating shaft. These are called ‘servo horns’ and the standard ones you’ll get are plastic pieces. They’re good but often short and not very strong plastic.

This Machined Aluminum Red Servo Arm lets you bring your A-Game to servo projects. It’s made out of strong anodized aluminum, looks great, is easy to install, and will last for a long time.

The servo arm is ~57mm long, and the arm part is 4mm thick aluminum. It has three tapped 2.5mm screw holes and a 3mm screw hole on the end (M3 compatible). The holes are 32mm, 38mm, and 45mm from the center rotational point.

The center part mates with 25-tooth servo axles. We’ve found it’s compatible with our standard-size servo motors:

• Continuous Rotation Servo – Feetech FS5103R
• Standard Servo – TowerPro SG-5010
• Standard Size – High Torque – Metal Gear Servo

But it will not fit neither the Parallax Feedback 360 Degree High Speed Continuous Rotation Servo nor micro and sub-micro servos.

Adam Hughes writes about the sensors contained in modern smartphones and how they can be used, especially with web browsers.

Your phone is dense with sensors. Cameras and microphones, of course, but also accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, ambient light sensors, GPS, Bluetooth radios. Most of them are accessible from a web page — a single HTML file, no app store involved. I built a series of small demos to see how far you can get with just <canvas>, the Web APIs, and a couple hundred lines of JavaScript each.

Each demo is one self-contained file. Open it on your phone over HTTPS, grant the permission it asks for, watch the sensor become a thing you can see, hear, or play with.

There are 23 demonstrations. An example is a Guitar Tuner.

You can read more on this open source work here. The MIT licensed code is on GitHub.

Dmitry Grinberg posts about the Fisher Price Pixter and the first ever complete reverse engineering, documentation, emulation, and preservation of all Fisher-Price/Mattel Pixter device series and [almost] all the games.

Fisher-Price (owned by Mattel) produced some toys in the early 2000 under the Pixter brand. They were touchscreen-based drawing toys, with cartridge-based extra games one could plug in. Pixter devices of the first three generations (“classic”, “plus”, and “2.0”) featured 80×80 black-and-white screens, which makes them of no interest for rePalm. The last two generations of Pixter (“color” and “multimedia”) featured 160×160 color displays. Now, this was more like it!

Pixter was quite popular, as far as kids’ toys go, in USA in the early 2000s.

See the well documented reverse engineering details in the post here.

And see the previous blog post about porting PalmOS to the Pixter here.

J. B. Crawford posts on the Computers Are Bad newsletter about Very Low Frequency and Extremely Low Frequency transmitters as used by the US, mainly for submarine communications.

Radio communications with the US Navy dates back to 1887. And use on submarines started with launching new vehicles in 1909. Early tests didn’t go well.

It wasn’t until 1917 when two different approaches were found by different teams.

Willoughby had been experimenting with unusually low radio frequencies, below 30kHz where wavelengths become too long for most antenna designs and coils become the best receivers. These lower frequencies were significantly less affected by water than higher, more conventional frequencies, and Willoughby and Lowell built a successful prototype for what they called “long-wave” radio between two coils.

World War I led to development of Very Low Frequency (VLF) transmitters.

To maximize transmission underwater, the US Navy also experimented with Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) transmission and reception.

Balancing the desire for the lowest possible frequency against the practical challenges of ELF, the Navy settled on the range of 72-80 Hz as the most promising window for submerged submarines.

See the well written history of this technology in the newsletter here.

Each year the Pulitzer Prize recognizes excellence in journalism, books, drama, and music. The literary awards include fiction, nonfiction, history, biography, memoir/autobiography, and poetry and make for an exciting array of excellent reads.

Read more

Super fun (and super cute-looking) project from maker gokux:

While many makers are busy building desk buddіes, I wanted to try something unique. I wonderеd if a ‍fortune cookie could actually hold an ΕSP32. This idea led to the eFortune Cookie, a smаll interacti‍ve gadget featuring an e-paper disрlay. By simply shaking the device, a random fоrtune appears on th‍e screen. It works entirelу offline and stores over 3,000 fortunes, so nо Wi-Fi is required.

See more details here on Instructables.

You can do almost anything in your browser. Your agents should be able to as well. But when agent products are built on top of existing browsers, they inevitably run into captchas, login failures, and blocked sessions.

Rotunda is a browser forked from Firefox and honest about fingerprinting. It’s designed so the agent on your laptop can surf the web the way you do – locally, on your home network, outside of the arms race.

See the video below and above and more at rotunda.sh.

Inside the Heathkit Factory: How a $39.50 Kit Built Michigan’s Empire…. Then Lost Everything.

If you were tto walk into any electronics lab in the 1970s, you’d find Heathkits—oscilloscopes, multimeters, signal generators—equipment people had built themselves and understood completely.

In 1947, a $39.50 oscilloscope kit changed American electronics forever. It wasn’t sophisticated. It wasn’t pretty. But it worked, and anyone could build it.

The Heath Company that started from government surplus auction had discovered something the big electronics manufacturers missed: Americans didn’t just want to buy electronics—they wanted to understand them.

By the 1970s, more than 1,800 workers were building kits in a massive factory in St. Joseph, Michigan. Heathkit catalogs offered over 300 products—everything from ham radios to color televisions to early personal computers.

Two generations of engineers learned electronics by building Heathkits at kitchen tables.

See the video below. And more articles from Adafruit here. Via Hackaday.

https://youtu.be/6pW24eMYix8?si=CRRH7vjoL9a8m9lL

If you missed this week’s Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter, here is the ICYMI (in case you missed it) version.

To never miss another issue, subscribe now! – You’ll get a terrific newsletter each Monday (which is out before this post). 12,368 subscribers worldwide!

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From the Editor:

Welcome to the latest Python on Microcontrollers newsletter! What a week to report on. KiCad 10 finally brings industrial circuit board design to everyone for free. And CERN gives it a boost with 17,000 component symbols and footprints (a tedious job to do oneself). And if you use JLCPCB, you can get their components added to KiCad with a free website. Python is being accepted as the one language that AI does best on. Likely because there are so many good, open projects to train on.

A really neat Pi PIO simulator is perfect for debugging purposes. And CircuitPython has two new releases to smooth out some issues. There is just so much in this issue, so please look through and see what relates to your busy life. Until next week – Anne Barela, Editor

P.S. Just a note that I try my best to remove tracking cruft on web links. No one wants to be tracked.

We’re on Discord, Twitter/X, BlueSky and for past newsletters – view them all here. If you’re reading this on the web, please subscribe here. Here’s the news this week:

CERN’s Open Source KiCad Library Gives the World 17,000 Circuit Board Components

CERN has released its complete KiCad component library under an open source license, making it available to hardware designers anywhere in the world. The library, maintained by CERN’s Design Office, contains more than 17,000 electronic components in the form of schematic symbols and printed circuit board footprints – CERN.

Also: A web-based Python tool, JLC2KiCad, that converts JLCPCB parts information into KiCad format – jlc2kicad-webui.manus.space.

Editor’s Note: This allows easier access to making KiCad PCBs, in turn turning Python projects into tangible hardware. A win for us all.

A PIO simulator for Raspberry Pi RP2040/RP2350

ice458 on GitHub has made an extremely useful tool for folks using PIO on Raspberry Pi RP2040/RP2350 microcontrollers. A full simulator for PIO programs with waveforms, pins, and registers – GitHub.io and Adafruit Blog. Via X.

A Foundation Model in Your Pocket

Eben Upton built Raspberry Pi to get more kids into computer science. It’s now the third most popular computer in history, a $1.5 billion industrial business, and used everywhere from outer space to the AI frontier – Colossus.

CircuitPython 10.2.1 and CircuitPython 10.3.0-alpha.2 Released

CircuitPython 10.2.1 and CircuitPython 10.3.0-alpha.2 have been released. They are bugfix revisions of CircuitPython – Adafruit Blog, release notes 10.2.1 – GitHub, and release notes 10.3.0-alpha.2 – GitHub.

Highlights for Both Releases

• Fix crashes on certain boards with integral displays.
• Adafruit MagTag 2025: improve display quality and support new display variant.

Additional Highlights for 10.3.0-alpha.2

• Add CIRCUITPY_SDCARD_USB to settings.toml to control visibility of a mounted SD card on USB.
• Support float values in settings.toml.
• Report USB MSC drives as removable media to the host.
• Update ESP-IDF to v6.0.1.
• Fix audiomixer.Mixer regressions on SAMx5x.
• STM: support audio.AudioOut using DAC.

AI is Ready to Take Over Python Programming, But Not Much Else

A Microsoft paper finds that AI performance varies sharply by domain. Python is the only domain where most models are ‘ready,’ and the best model reaches that threshold in only 11 of 52 domains – CIO.

I tested the new OpenAI Codex features on a real Python codebase, and it’s the strongest Claude Code rival yet – The New Stack.

TIOBE Index for May 2026: R Ascends as Python Slips Below 20%

May’s TIOBE Index has a clear headline move inside the top 10: R climbs to #8, matching its best-ever rank. TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen says it fits a broader pattern in statistical programming, where attention is gathering around fewer ecosystems rather than spreading across a long list of specialized tools. Python remains #1 at 19.98%, and even with the drop, it still sits far ahead of every other language in the table. The lead is not in question, but the rating continues to drift downward month to month – TechRepublic.

A Raspberry Pi AMA on Reddit

On Thursday, 21st May, Eben Upton, James Adams and Gordon Hollingworth of Raspberry Pi will be live on Reddit’s r/engineering from 3 to 5pm BST, answering questions about industrial and embedded applications of Raspberry Pi. Compute Modules in production, RP2040/RP2350, real-time performance, industrial protocols… bring whatever you’ve got. Between the three of them they cover the full stack – Reddit. Via LinkedIn.

An Altoids Tin Mini-Cyberdeck

Altoids Tins are the perfect container. From survival kits, custom handheld game systems, to sewing, watercolors, and first aid, people have been repurposing the tin of the curiously strong mints for decades. Recently a strong desire came over YouTuber Exercising Ingenuity to build a tiny cyberdeck inside of one of these tins using a Raspberry Pi Zero W – Hackaday.io, Hackster.io, YouTube and GitHub. Via X.

This Week’s Python Streams

Python on Hardware is all about building a cooperative ecosphere which allows contributions to be valued and to grow knowledge. Below are the streams within the last week focusing on the community.

CircuitPython Deep Dive Stream

Last Friday, Scott streamed work on hardware in the loop software.

You can see the latest video and past videos on the Adafruit YouTube channel under the Deep Dive playlist – YouTube.

CircuitPython Parsec

John Park’s CircuitPython Parsec this week is on LCD Character Display Buffer Width – Adafruit Blog and YouTube.

Catch all the episodes in the YouTube playlist.

Deep Dive with Tim

Last week, Tim streamed work on LLM Agent Embodiment Kit and HTTPServer Channel.

You can see the latest video and past videos on the Adafruit YouTube channel under the Deep Dive playlist – YouTube.

CircuitPython Weekly Meeting

CircuitPython Weekly Meeting for May 11, 2026 (notes) on YouTube.

Project of the Week: A Little Computer That Writes Poems About Computers

Yafira, electrocutelab on Instagram, has created ribbon_logic (2026) – Instagram.

“apparently i can’t stop making things about computers. my thesis is a computer. now this is a little computer that writes poems about computers. at some point i stopped questioning it lol ✿. a tiny poetry generator that lives on a 2.1” round screen. one button, one LiPo battery, infinite soft poems about soft machines. built with circuitpython on an @adafruit qualia, running a markov chain trained on my own freewriting and seeded with words from our class’s hand-tagged semantic corpus. it refuses cold, sharp, and academic words at the point of generation. the form and the content say the same thing. the text gives the computer a different personality, less command line, more daydream. the glitch is intentional. the screen stutters, the text flickers, the poem arrives in pieces. small machines should be allowed to be imperfect.”

Popular Last Week

What was the most popular, most clicked link, in last week’s newsletter? 5 useful things a $5 ESP32 can do for your home network.

Did you know you can read past issues of this newsletter in the Adafruit Daily Archive? Check it out.

Adafruit Playground Notes

Adafruit Playground is a new place for the community to post their projects and other making tips/tricks/techniques. Ad-free, it’s an easy way to publish your work in a safe space for free.

News From Around the Web

The ESP32-S31, announced back in March, has been spotted on social media – X.

There has been discussion of it not being a drop in replacement for the ESP32-S3 – SeeedStudio.

Claude Code Commands cheat sheet – X.

Also a Claude cheat sheet – X.

A tiny, always-on display using an Adafruit Matrix Portal S3 + 64×32 RGB LED matrix, coded in CircuitPython – guylewin.com and GitHub.

Dmitrii Eliuseev provides a comprehensive guide on building a DIY real-time radiation monitor using an ESP32 and MicroPython. The project is designed to be affordable and capable of sending data to IoT platforms – Medium.

Pyrefly, the fast, open-source type checker and language server for Python, built by Meta, has reached version 1.0.0 – YouTube.

A native CNN (Convolutional Neural Network Module) for CircuitPython – Reddit.

A starter MCP server for controlled access to CircuitPython boards across Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is built for the common edit-deploy-reset loop: inspect the board, update files, read serial output, and recover quickly when code needs to be interrupted – GitHub.

Also: An MCP for MicroPython, featured last month – Switch Science and GitHub. (Japanese)

The PyCon US 2026 Typing Summit recaps typing advances – Let’s Data Science.

Trying Maker Pi RP2040 with CircuitPython (Part 1) – elchika (Japanese). Via X.

New: search Raspberry Pi documentation by meaning, not keywords – Raspberry Pi News.

Four ways Python has turned my Android phone into the ultimate homelab companion – How-To Geek.

Connie’s first mini experiment with the Cardputer ADV. Bypassed the default firmware to directly read the TCA8418 I2C keyboard chip and drive a PWM servo with MicroPython. Added a custom UI for that extra slick feel – X.

Having the SP40 and SP30 air quality sensors face off, side-by-side in CircuitPython – BlueSky.

Install HOOBS on Your Raspberry Pi in 10 Minutes or Less – Raspberry Tips.

How to install Python 3.14.5 on Windows 11 – YouTube.

Three Raspberry Pi weekend projects that actually solve real problems – How-To Geek.

Create mathematical animations with Python code – GitHub.

New

CyberArch/Carbon Computers brand, has introduced the Pi Slate, a powerful handheld cyberdeck designed for portable computing and security-focused applications. Built around the Raspberry Pi 5, the Pi Slate integrates a 5-inch 1280×720 touchscreen, a backlit RGB keyboard with an integrated cursor, and a 10,000 mAh battery for 3–5 hours of portable use in a compact enclosure. It supports modular expansion for HATs such as LoRa, SDR, AI accelerators, and M.2 storage, and includes cooling support, antenna mounts, and an optional modular back with a kickstand – CNX.

The OpenMV AE3 is a small, low power, microcontroller board which allows you to easily implement applications using machine vision in the real world. You program the OpenMV AE3 in high level Python scripts (courtesy of the MicroPython Operating System) instead of C/C++ – OpenMV. Via X.

M5Stack has introduced the PaperColor, a compact development board built around the ESP32-S3R8 processor and a 4-inch Spectra 6 full-color e-paper display. The system is based on the ESP32-S3R8 SoC featuring dual Xtensa LX7 cores operating at up to 240 MHz together with 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi support. The board integrates 16MB Flash storage, 8MB PSRAM, and an onboard microSD card slot for expandable storage – LinuxGizmos.

New Boards Supported by CircuitPython

The number of supported microcontrollers and Single Board Computers (SBC) grows every week. This section outlines which boards have been included in CircuitPython or added to CircuitPython.org.

This week there were two new boards added:

• WeAct Studio RP2350B Core by WeAct Studio
• Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-2.41 by Waveshare

Note: For non-Adafruit boards, please use the support forums of the board manufacturer for assistance, as Adafruit does not have the hardware to assist in troubleshooting.

Looking to add a new board to CircuitPython? It’s highly encouraged! Adafruit has four guides to help you do so:

• How to Add a New Board to CircuitPython
• How to add a New Board to the circuitpython.org website
• Adding a Single Board Computer to PlatformDetect for Blinka
• Adding a Single Board Computer to Blinka

New Adafruit Learning System Guides

The Adafruit Learning System has over 3,200 free guides for learning skills and building projects including using Python.

BLE Beacon NeoPixels from Ruiz Brothers

Sensor-Locked Secrets with CircuitPython from Tim C

CircuitPython Libraries

The CircuitPython library numbers are continually increasing, while existing ones continue to be updated. Here we provide library numbers and updates!

To get the latest Adafruit libraries, download the Adafruit CircuitPython Library Bundle. To get the latest community contributed libraries, download the CircuitPython Community Bundle.

If you’d like to contribute to the CircuitPython project on the Python side of things, the libraries are a great place to start. Check out the CircuitPython.org Contributing page. If you’re interested in reviewing, check out Open Pull Requests. If you’d like to contribute code or documentation, check out Open Issues. We have a guide on contributing to CircuitPython with Git and GitHub, and you can find us in the #help-with-circuitpython and #circuitpython-dev channels on the Adafruit Discord.

You can check out this list of all the Adafruit CircuitPython libraries and drivers available.

The current number of CircuitPython libraries is 569!

New Libraries

There are no new CircuitPython libraries this week.

Updated Libraries

Here are this week’s updated CircuitPython libraries:

• relic-se/CircuitPython_TLV320AIC3204

What’s the CircuitPython team up to this week?

What is the team up to this week? Let’s check in:

Dan

I released CircuitPython 10.2.1 last week, with fixes for crashes for certain boards with integral displays, and a big improvement in display quality for the MagTag 2025 (thanks Mikey Sklar!).

CircuitPython 10.3.0-alpha.2 was also released late last Friday, after Scott fixed a problem with the update to Espress ESP-IDF v6.0.1.

Tim

I’ve been working on a few more revisions of my PR to implement a module in the CircuitPython core for I2SIn. I showed a demo on Show & Tell that uses ulab for FFT to make multiple strips of NeoPixels reactive to different frequencies within audio. My other project right now is an embodiment kit that uses a Feather S3 reverse TFT with various sensors and outputs like lights, vibration motor, and piezo buzzer to make a device intended to let an LLM sense and interact with the environment that the human user is in. I refactored parts of the communication on my stream Tuesday, and I’ve got all of the hardware put together on a perma-proto breadboard now.

Scott

This past week I tested the P4GPIO board, found and fixed an issue. I also made the same fix to the P4HIL board and then ordered them both. I’ve detoured back to Zephyr to update to the latest and greatest. At the same time, I’m working on the software side of hardware in the loop. It involves the harness firmware for USBIP, logic capture and toggling GPIO. My goal is to have the testing working on generic hardware and be able to scale up when the P4HIL boards arrive.

Liz

This week I’ve been working on a PCB that can fit in the Ikea Alpstuga CO2 monitor. It uses an ESP32-S3 and an HT16K33 to drive the LEDs that fit into a character mask in the enclosure. I have a scan of the original board to get the coordinates of each LED for the layout.

Upcoming Events

The Open Source Hardware Association Open Hardware Summit will be in Berlin, Germany on May 23rd and 24th, 2026.

The next MicroPython Meetup in Melbourne will be on May 27 – Luma. You can see recordings of previous meetings on YouTube.

Other Events This Year

• EuroPython 2026 is coming to Kraków, Poland 13-19 July, 2026.
• PyOhio 2026 is from 25 July through 26 July, 2026 this year in Cleveland, USA.
• HOPE 26 Conference is from August 14th through 16th at the New Yorker Hotel, NY, NY.
• PyCon AU 2026 will be 26 Aug. 2026 – 30 Aug. 2026 in Brisbane, Australia

If you know of virtual events or upcoming events, please let us know via email to cpnews(at)adafruit(dot)com.

Latest Releases

CircuitPython’s stable release is 10.2.1 and its unstable release is 10.3.0-alpha.2. New to CircuitPython? Start with our Welcome to CircuitPython Guide.

20260508 is the latest Adafruit CircuitPython library bundle.

20260515 is the latest CircuitPython Community library bundle.

v1.28.0 is the latest MicroPython release. Documentation for it is here.

3.14.5 is the latest Python release. The latest pre-release version is 3.15.0b1.

4,477 Stars Like CircuitPython? Star it on GitHub!

Call for Help – Translating CircuitPython is now easier than ever

One important feature of CircuitPython is translated control and error messages. With the help of fellow open source project Weblate, we’re making it even easier to add or improve translations.

Sign in with an existing account such as GitHub, Google or Facebook and start contributing through a simple web interface. No forks or pull requests needed! As always, if you run into trouble join us on Discord, we’re here to help.

39,007 Thanks

The Adafruit Discord community, where we do all our CircuitPython development in the open, reached over 39,007 humans – thank you! Adafruit believes Discord offers a unique way for Python on hardware folks to connect. Join today at https://adafru.it/discord.

ICYMI – In case you missed it

Python on hardware is the Adafruit Python video-newsletter-podcast! The news comes from the Python community, Discord, Adafruit communities and more and is broadcast on ASK an ENGINEER Wednesdays. The complete Python on Hardware weekly videocast playlist is here. The video podcast is on iTunes, YouTube, Instagram, and XML.

The weekly community chat on Adafruit Discord server CircuitPython channel – Audio / Podcast edition – Audio from the Discord chat space for CircuitPython, meetings are usually Mondays at 2pm ET, this is the audio version on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and XML feed.

Contribute

The CircuitPython Weekly Newsletter is a CircuitPython community-run newsletter emailed every Monday. To contribute your content, please email your news to cpnews (at) adafruit (dot) com with information and link(s) to your content.

Join the Adafruit Discord or post to the forum if you have questions.

The original ayumi AY-3-8910 / AY-8912 emulation library by true-grue is mathematically perfect, but it uses double (64-bit) floating-point numbers.

The ESP32-S3 microcontroller has no hardware FPU for double, causing I2S underruns and crackling.

The AY8912_ESP32 library re-implements the exact same logic using float (32-bit) numbers. The ESP32-S3 hardware FPU handles float natively, leaving CPU headroom for an app.

There are no external dependencies. No double math (no CPU crunch, no crackling). Just pure float logic — runs smoothly at 44100 Hz even on a single core.

• Cycle-accurate emulation: exact DAC table, 17-bit noise LFSR, 16 envelope shapes
• Stereo panning: per-channel left/right balance
• I2S native: works with any I2S DAC (PCM5102, MAX98357, etc.)
• Zero crackling: all math in float (ESP32-S3 hardware FPU)
• Tiny footprint: ~200 bytes RAM, no dynamic allocation
• PT3 player built-in: play ZX Spectrum Pro Tracker 3 music directly

See the details of this MIT licensed software on GitHub.

Zane St. John plugged in a $35 projector from AliExpress and pointed it at a bedroom wall. Within minutes of connecting it to WiFi, the home Pi-hole security portal lit up due to issues.

When I powered it on, the experience was more professional than expected. Android 11 (API 30), production build (not signed with test keys!), and not rooted out of the box. But the polished launcher couldn’t fully mask the sketchiness underneath—as my Pi-hole had already made clear.

Armed with adb and jadx, I started examining the pre-installed apps. The first red flag: a litany of com.htc. packages on a device that isn’t made by HTC. It’s made by a company called Hotack (sold under brand names like Magcubic). A thin disguise.

I’d been using Claude Code with mixed success (mostly positive) for software engineering work, and I suspected it could do more than just speed up the tedious parts of reverse engineering.

Working through each decompiled APK, Claude Code mapped a coordinated suite of vendor malware.

I expected adware. Maybe a tracking pixel. What Claude Code found was a multi-stage RAT with active C2 infrastructure, firmware-level persistence, a plugin system, and a direct pipeline into a commercial residential proxy network—all pre-installed at the factory on a device sold openly on major marketplaces.

See the details of what was found inside the software on the device and more in the article here and on GitHub.

The Python for Microcontrollers Newsletter is the place for the latest news involving Python on hardware (microcontrollers AND single board computers like Raspberry Pi).

This ad-free, spam-free weekly email is filled with CircuitPython, MicroPython, and Python information that you may have missed, all in one place!

You get a summary of all the software, events, projects, and the latest hardware worldwide once a week, no ads! You can cancel anytime.

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LEET modular is a multifunctional Eurorack compatible module. It is versatile, easy to build, cheap and MIT-licensed open source.

Current implemented (rudimentary) functions:

• VCO / Oscillators (with different waveforms, AM, FM, folding, quantization, and other features)
• LFO
• VCF (with a few different low pass filters)
• Noise generator
• Delay/ reverb
• MIDI to CV (USB-C)
• Initialization / Set up / trim mode (to facilitate the initial tuning of a new unit)
• I have also built 3D printable support modules so it can be used without additional devices:
  • power module converting USB-C (5V) to the Eurorack standard (12V & -12V)
  • passive attenuator (used to drive line out / headphones)

Read more here and the project on GitHub.

Summer is quickly approaching. Don’t sweat in the subway, print a squeezable fan! Check out this cool design from GeorgeZSL shared via instructables

Let’s just admit it, all of the squeeze fans available are just toys. They are fun to play around for 5 minutes, but cannot really be used functionally. The wind is too little, the hand gets caught in the blades, and nowhere to grab. This is an upgraded larger version where you can actually use it to cool down!
I also narrowed down the tolerances of the original design to make the fan less wobbly, and the pins to fit more snug.

If spinning too fast, the cover may separate from the case since they are just held together by pins. Use superglue if necessary.
Please see the 2nd photo for instructions for putting together. There are 2 fan blades, choose whichever one you prefer. You may need to use a mallet to knock the pins into place.

The goal is a system that is both educational and genuinely usable: clear code, honest documentation, and no hidden defects.

Status: the hardware platform (VGA, PS/2 keyboard, SD card, audio) is working and verified on real hardware. A code editor and a BASIC are planned as next steps.

Check out this MIT licensed project on GitHub.

At the Outline Demoparty in May 2026, Ommen, NL was an exploration of algorithmic density in 16 bytes of x86 assembly.

In the demoscene, exploring what can be achieved within extreme constraints is a rewarding technical challenge. The following 16 bytes of x86 real-mode DOS assembly code represent a careful exercise in algorithmic density. When executed, it utilizes the computer’s video memory as a calculation space to draw an infinite Sierpinski fractal, while simultaneously interpreting that geometry as audio data.

int 10h          ; 2 bytes
mov bh, 0xb8     ; 2 bytes
mov ds, bx       ; 2 bytes
L:
lodsb            ; 1 byte
sub si, byte 57  ; 3 bytes
xor [si], al     ; 2 bytes
out 61h, al      ; 2 bytes
jmp short L      ; 2 bytes

The code begins with a standard BIOS interrupt: int 10h. This initializes Video Mode 0, establishing a 40×25 text mode grid. The subsequent instructions point the Data Segment (DS) to 0xB800, the physical memory address of the VGA/CGA text buffer.

When the BIOS clears the screen during this interrupt, it does not fill the memory with absolute zeroes. In text mode, every character space consists of two bytes: the ASCII character and the color attribute. The BIOS initializes all 2,000 character slots uniformly: the ASCII byte is set to 0x20 (the Space character), and the color byte is set to 0x07 (Light Gray text on a Black background). While the screen appears completely empty, it is actually a canvas primed with a uniform pattern of data.

See the mathematical view in the post here.

Arnaud Carré writes on Leonard’s Blog for who love the technical and historical aspects of chiptune music, as well as enthusiasts of the Amiga PAULA and Atari YM2149 audio chips.

I had the idea of playing Atari music on the Amiga during my future dot record attempt. To do that, I needed to emulate the YM2149 sound chip. I had already written an Atari music emulator for the Amiga back in time in my AmigAtari demo.

However, accurately reproducing modern Atari music effects, such as SID voices, Sync Buzzer, and Digidrums, requires emulating not only the YM2149 but also the Atari’s hardware timers. This kind of emulation is extremely CPU intensive, consuming around 50% of the frame time in my 2020 AmigAtari demo. That makes it impossible to break a sin-dots record at the same time.

The YM2149 is a slightly modified version of the AY-3-8910, rebranded by Yamaha. It is a relatively simple sound chip. It has three voices capable only of generating square waves. A pseudo-random noise generator and a basic hardware volume envelope, intended as a cheap ADSR envelope substitute.

PAULA, the Amiga’s audio chip, takes a completely different approach. It is a PCM sample playback chip with no built-in support for square waves, noise generation, or envelopes. PAULA can play four independent signed 8-bit PCM samples directly from main memory, each with its own playback rate and volume.

See how it was done in the video below and the article with details here.

The Python for Microcontrollers Newsletter is the place for the latest news involving Python on hardware (microcontrollers AND single board computers like Raspberry Pi).

This ad-free, spam-free weekly email is filled with CircuitPython, MicroPython, and Python information that you may have missed, all in one place!

You get a summary of all the software, events, projects, and the latest hardware worldwide once a week, no ads! You can cancel anytime.

It arrives about 11 am Monday (US Eastern time) with all the week’s happenings.

And please tell your friends, colleagues, students, etc.

Please sign up > > >

NEW PRODUCT – Through Hole Inline Pogo Pin Target Header – 9-Pin 0.1″ Spacing

This strip of gold-plated target pads is used when you want to have a solid pogo-pin connection point on your PCB. Note that these are not springy – that would be the pogo half you provide. Instead, this is what the pogo touches to make a connection. The top surface has a convex bowl so that the tip of a spear/pointy pogo will center nicely.

Pogo pins are little spring-loaded contacts, very handy for making jigs or making momentary (but electrically solid) contacts. We use them by the dozen to make programming and testing jigs, but they’re also handy if, say, you want to JTAG program a board you can’t solder headers to. We sell pogo pins here if you need, any of them will poke nicely into this strip.

Comes with a single in-line 9-pin pogo-target header with 0.1″/2.54mm spacing. You could snap or cut these to make smaller bits, but you may lose a pogo target in between, so keep that in mind.

Via Library of Congress:

“Doom” Soundtrack – Bobby Prince, composer (1993)
Originally released in 1993, the video game Doom brought a heavy metal energy to MS-DOS systems across the globe, while at the same time pioneering the ever-popular first-person shooter genre. Key to Doom’s popularity was the adrenaline-fueled soundtrack created by freelance video game music composer Bobby Prince. Prince, a lifelong musician and practicing lawyer, was fascinated by the MIDI technology that rose in prominence in the mid-1980s as a means for instrument control and composition, an interest that led to his earliest work composing video games. For “Doom,” Prince took inspiration from a pile of CDs loaned by the game’s chief designer, John Romero, including seminal works by Alice in Chains, Pantera and Metallica. Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers, Prince composed the perfect riff-shredding accompaniment for the game’s demon-slaying journey to hell and back. Taking advantage of his knowledge of MIDI, Prince even worked to ensure that the sound effects he created could cut through the music by assigning them to different MIDI frequencies. The “Doom” soundtrack would go on to inspire countless remixes and lay the foundation for future generations of game composers.

Fun history from Scott Tobin on YouTube as he plays Doom and chats with composer Bobby Prince!

Composers Play – “Doom” Coop with Bobby Prince!

DOOM on Fruit Jam

Yes, it does! The infamous genre defining PC video game DOOM runs on the Adafruit Fruit Jam. Adafruiter and developer extraordinaire Jeff Epler ported the RP2040 Doom project to run on the Fruit Jam.

This port of DOOM includes the shareware version of the original game. It has the first episode, “Knee-Deep into the Dead”, which has 9 levels designed to give players a taste of the full game.

An exhibit celebrating Chinese-American illustrator Ed Young is on view now at The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), which is located at 215 Centre Street New York, NY 10013.

The exhibit titled Ed Young’s Bright Worlds: Gesture and Feeling in 60 Years of Picture Books for Children is open now through September. Lon Po Po and Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China are some of my all time favorite children’s books – I’ll definitely be checking this one out!

Young achieved distinction as a beloved storyteller and illustrator who challenged younger audiences with pictorial and moral complexity. He was a towering figure in children’s literature, reaching wide audiences while earning the field’s top honors. His retelling of the Chinese “Little Red Riding Hood,” Lon Po Po, introduced generations of children to Chinese folklore and won the Caldecott Medal; he also received two Caldecott Honors for earlier works. Across his career, he garnered numerous accolades, including multiple selections for The New York Times’ “10 Best Illustrated Children’s Books” list.

Gyroflow is an application that can stabilize your video by using motion data from a gyroscope and optionally an accelerometer. Modern cameras record that data internally (GoPro, Sony, Insta360 etc), and this application stabilizes the captured footage precisely by using them. It can also use gyro data from an external source (eg. from Betaflight blackbox).

See the video below and more on GitHub.

Bumbershoot Software writes about a nice lazy afternoon with PICO-8 making a port of Simulated Evolution.

The first challenge, of course, was that I had to write the simulation itself. My earlier implementations were all in C or assembly language, and PICO-8 needs to be programmed in its own dialect of Lua. Happily, Lua is, itself, pretty comfy, so adapting the C code was straightforward. It was not, however, perfectly exact.

The original BASIC code I had adapted was a little bit buggy. It intended to loop through all the bugs in each simulation step, but because of the way iterations interacted with births and deaths, sometimes a bug would have its turn skipped if some other bug died or fissioned near it in memory.

My C code made this more consistent while retaining much of the structure of the BASIC original. The Lua version, however, diverges a little bit in its design, and as a result while I did keep things consistent, it’s differently consistent.

Check it all out here.

On the lcamtuf’s thing blog, they take a design for a metered clock and update it with a modern look.

As the name implies, these clocks use analog panel voltmeters instead of traditional clock faces to display time. I didn’t come up with the idea, so I never really blogged about the design; I just built one and kept it on my office desk.

The idea endures, but most of the designs I see on the internet are needlessly complicated and not all that pretty, so when I decided to build a revised design, I figured it might be good to document it better.

For this version of the meter clock, I opted to use three generic, 90° panel voltmeters from Amazon (link, about $9).

See the video below and build details in the blog post here.

The Old Vintage Computing Research blog looks at the Tomy Tutor from 1983:

The Tomy Tutor was my first computer, in late 1983. I was seven and we got it at Federated. I’ve acquired several more since then, but this is the actual one I used and it still works perfectly.

Using a design modeled on the doomed Texas Instruments 99/8, one of several unreleased successors to the TI 99/4A, the Tomy Tutor and its overseas siblings, the Japanese Pyuuta (ぴゅう太) series, promised an easy kid-friendly introduction to computers with a durable case, nice graphics and sound, games on cartridge, and two, count ’em, two internal dialects of BASIC (one on early systems).

It had 16K of RAM, though this was entirely tied up in the 9918A video display processor with only 256 bytes of RAM directly addressable by its 2.7MHz TMS 9995 CPU, and of Tomy’s promised peripherals only game controllers and a tape deck were ever offered.

Read more on the blog here.

ThroatyMumbo on GitHub posts Windows CE 2.11 on the Nintendo 64.

Stock Microsoft Windows CE 2.11 running on a real Nintendo 64. A custom HAL drops the unmodified nk.lib kernel onto VR4300, brings up the CE 2.11 GWES desktop and shell, mounts the EverDrive-64 X7’s SD card under \SDCard, treats the N64 controller as a mouse, plays sound through the N64 AI hardware via the standard CE wave stack, and runs third-party CE 2.11 EXEs straight off the SD card.

This is a hobby reverse-engineering project: there is no official CE 2.11 port to N64 from Microsoft. Everything below the unmodified nk.lib (HAL, OAL, display driver, FSD, kbd/mouse PDD, wave PDD, RDP-accelerated GDI fill, ed64-X7 driver) is part of this repo.

Check out the video below and more on GitHub.

Fred Lambert on Electrek writes how Fisker Ocean SUV owners organized, reverse-engineered their vehicles’ proprietary software, hacked into CAN bus networks, built open-source tools on GitHub, and effectively stood up a volunteer-run open-sourced car company from the ashes of Fisker.

From $70,000 SUVs to orphans overnight

The speed of Fisker’s collapse was staggering. The company, once touted as a Tesla rival that had secured over 31,000 Ocean reservations totaling $1.7 billion in potential revenue, produced just 11,000 vehicles before the money ran out. Bankruptcy filings revealed more than $1 billion in debts.

The core problem was architectural. Fisker had built what Cory Doctorow, the digital rights author and activist, pointedly called a “software-based car.” Virtually every subsystem in the Ocean — brakes, airbags, shifting, battery management, door locks — needed to periodically connect with Fisker’s cloud servers for diagnostics or regular operations. When those servers went dark, the cars didn’t just lose their infotainment screens. They lost critical functionality.

See how an open source collaboration saved the vehicles in the article here.

Giuseppe Sollazzo organized each of the 1,795 songs performed by lyrical content: love, peace & unity, freedom, nostalgia & memory, fantasy & dream, empowerment & resilience, joy & celebration, music & meta-song, identity & homeland, rebellion & war, via flowingdata.

Scroll down and the chart will rearrange itself to tell the story: which themes dominate, which winners broke the mould, how Eurovision’s languages shifted over seven decades, and which words belong to one single song and nowhere else. At the end the chart becomes yours to explore.

Read more

A precisely 3D-printed 200×100×100mm desk organizer with two spacious drawers wrapped in futuristic paneling. Keeps your bench tidy while looking like it belongs in a spaceship

download the files on: https://makerworld.com/en/models/540542-futuristic-sci-fi-drawer-organizer

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord

Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit

Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting

3D Printing Projects Playlist:

3D Hangout Show Playlist:

Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist:

Timelapse Tuesday Playlist:

Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media:

Noe’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/ecken

Pedro’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/videopixil

A highly modular, screw-free tool holder system with mix-and-match horizontal panels, side panels of varying heights, and dedicated modules for screwdrivers, screw bits, tweezers, and pens. Extendable to any bench width

download the files on: https://makerworld.com/en/models/2162523-fully-modular-tool-organizer-system-20mm-version

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord

Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit

Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting

3D Printing Projects Playlist:

3D Hangout Show Playlist:

Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist:

Timelapse Tuesday Playlist:

Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media:

Noe’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/ecken

Pedro’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/videopixil

ADAFRUIT WEEKLY EDITORIAL ROUND-UP

We’ve got so much happening here at Adafruit that it’s not always easy to keep up! Don’t fret, we’ve got you covered. Each week we’ll be posting a handy round-up of what we’ve been up to, ranging from learn guides to blog articles, videos, and more.

Adafruit Graduation Gift Guide!

Maker Spotlight: Trevor Mead and Doloresaurus – LED Dinosaur Puppet Costume

BLE Beacon NeoPixels

May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2026

J.D. Hodges runs through the history of the ThinkPad. At one point, the ThinkPad was ubiquitous in office settings. The rugged laptop doesn’t get as much love as it used to, but it’s still going strong! Hodges makes great use of graphs, tables, and infographics!

ThinkPad has shipped continuously since October 1992 under two corporate owners (IBM 1992 to 2005, Lenovo 2005 to present), making it among the longest-running commercial laptop families on the market and unusually visually continuous from the 1992 700C to the 2026 P14s Gen 6. The 2005 IBM-to-Lenovo handoff did not rupture the brand the way skeptics expected: IBM’s ThinkPad engineering and design carried over largely intact, and Lenovo crossed 60 million ThinkPad units sold by 2010. The formula still has reasons to exist in 2026, when a 14-inch P14s Gen 6 AMD with 96 GB of DDR5 SODIMMs runs local 70-billion-parameter LLM workloads on a business chassis with a Copilot+ NPU and dedicated TrackPoint buttons.

Check it out!

Use this guide to make a simple cyberpunk/Tronpunk fashion project!

The Larson scanner is named after Glen Larson, producer of Knight Rider and the original Battlestar Galactica television series, both of which prominently featured the effect as the “eyes” of KITT, his nemesis KARR, and the Cylon Centurions.

Larson scanners were traditionally red (or yellow in KARR’s case), but thanks to the magic of NeoPixels you can change the software to use any colors you like.

This is a soldering project, albeit a small one. You will need the common soldering paraphernalia of a soldering iron, solder, wire (20 to 26 gauge, either stranded or solid) and tools for cutting and stripping wire.

You’ll need some method of securing the electronics inside the glasses. Hot-melt glue (with a glue gun) works well for this. Watch your fingers! Packing tape could also be used.

Check out the full guide in the Adafruit Learn system!

Exercising Ingenuity built a cyberdeck in an Altoids tin using a Raspberry Pi Zero and shared the process in this video on YouTube.

Ugh, now we’re feeling nostalgic for Minty Boost and MENTA. Chris Young made Printy Boost to scratch that itch.

As far as cyberdecks go, we’ve also got our CYBERDECK Bonnet and CYBERDECK HAT for Raspberry Pi 400 & 500.

The United Nations has designated May 17th  World Telecommunication & Information Society Day:

World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD) 2026 calls on governments, industry, and communities to strengthen the digital lifelines that keep the world running. Join us in designing the networks and systems that can withstand shocks and recover quickly, ensuring that no one is cut off and left offline when it matters most.

Celebrated every year on 17 May, World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD) highlights the growing role of digital technologies in our lives and commemorates the founding of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) – the United Nations Agency for Digital Technologies.

The theme for 2026 is Digital Lifelines – Strengthening resilience in a connected world:

Resilience needs to be designed and included in every element of connectivity: submarine cables linking continents, terrestrial networks carrying data across cities, satellites supporting communication and navigation, and data centers powering digital services. When any part of this chain fails, essential systems, from finance and healthcare to transport and disaster response, are at risk.

Learn more!

Learn how to turn your MACROPAD into the Hotkey wizard it was born to be; with Phillip Burgess on the Adafruit Learning System!

Press one of MACROPAD’s 12 keys to send a shortcut, function key or whole sequence of keystrokes to a connected computer. The OLED display provides a map, while LEDs under each key offer color-coded groups or themes. Turn the dial to select among different application sets.

This is one of those projects that you can simply find everyday use for as-is, or peer inside the code to see how CircuitPython makes this all pretty simple. Additionally, hotkey configuration files for different desktop applications are easily created, modified and shared.

See the full guide!

Hackster.io user Emmett Walter published a detailed showcase of their beautiful northern lights build.

Finding an API to pull data for this project from was extremely straightforward, the NOAA has a database that stores the values of the visibility of the northern lights at each set of latitude and longitude coordinates. The data given from this API was formatted as follows: [longitude, latitude, Probability of Visibility (out of 100%)].

Check out their code, query and more over on Hackster.io.

From the GitHub release page:

This is CircuitPython 10.3.0-alpha.2, an alpha release for 10.3.0. Further features, changes, and bug fixes will be added before the final release of 10.3.0.

Highlights of this release

• Fix crashes on certain boards with integral displays.
• Adafruit MagTag 2025: improve display quality and support new display variant.
• Add CIRCUITPY_SDCARD_USB to settings.toml to control visibility of a mounted SD card on USB.
• Support float values in settings.toml.
• Report USB MSC drives as removable media to the host.
• Update ESP-IDF to v6.0.1.
• Fix audiomixer.Mixer regressions on SAMx5x.
• STM: support audio.AudioOut, using DAC.

Download from circuitpython.org

Firmware downloads are available from the downloads page on circuitpython.org. The site makes it easy to select the correct file and language for your board.

Installation

To install follow the instructions in the Welcome to CircuitPython! guide. To install the latest libraries, see this page in that guide.

Try code.circuitpython.org or the latest version of the Mu editor for creating and editing your CircuitPython programs and for easy access to the CircuitPython serial connection (the REPL).

Documentation

Documentation is available in readthedocs.io.

Port status

CircuitPython has a number of “ports” that are the core implementations for different microcontroller families. Stability varies on a per-port basis. As of this release, these ports are consider stable (but see Known Issues below):

• atmel-samd: Microchip SAMD21, SAMx5x
• cxd56: Sony Spresense
• espressif: Espressif ESP32, ESP32-C2, ESP32-C3, ESP32-C6, ESP32-C61, ESP32-H2, ESP32-S2, ESP32-S3
• nordic: Nordic nRF52840, nRF52833
• raspberrypi: Raspberry Pi RP2040, RP2350
• stm: ST STM32F4 chip family

These ports are considered alpha and will have bugs and missing functionality:

• analog: Analog Devices MAX32690
• broadcom: Raspberry Pi boards such as RPi 4, RPi Zero 2W
• espressif: , ESP32-P4
• litex: fomu
• mimxrt10xx: NXP i.MX RT10xxx
• renode: hardware simulator
• silabs: Silicon Labs MG24 family
• stm: ST non-STM32F4 chip families
• zephyr: multiplatform RTOS, running on multiple chip families

Changes since 10.3.0-alpha.1

Fixes and enhancements

• Adafruit MagTag 2025: improve display quality. #11003, #11001. Thanks @mikeysklar.
• Update frozen libraries. #10998. Thanks @dhalbert.
• Fix crashes on boards with FourWire displays with no reset pin. #10997, #10995. Thanks @dhalbert.
• Add CIRCUITPY_SDCARD_USB to settings.toml to control SD card USB presentation. #10996. Thanks @dhalbert.
• Add support for float values in settings.toml. #10975. Thanks @dhalbert.
• Report USB MSC drives as removable media to the host. #10967. Thanks @mikeysklar.

Port and board-specific changes

Analog Devices

Broadcom

Espressif

• Fix WiFi/BLE crashes after ESP-IDF v6.0.1 upgrade. #11004. Thanks @tannewt.
• Preserve alarm.sleep_memory across software resets. #10989, #10899. Thanks @lzr
• Support ESP32-P4 V1. #10986. Thanks @tannewt.
• Update ESP-IDF to v6.0.1. #10922. Thanks @tannewt.

i.MX

Nordic

renode

RP2

SAMx

• Fix audiomixer.Mixer regressions on SAMx5x. #10906. Thanks @relic-se.

SiLabs

Spresense

STM

• Support audio.AudioOut, using DAC. #10976. Thanks @ChrisNourse.

Zephyr

Individual boards

• Adafruit MagTag 2025: improve display quality, support new display variant. #11003, #10992, #10987. Thanks @mikeysklar.
• Unexpected Maker S3 D series: add board.ANTENNA_SWITCH (board.IO41). #10984. Thanks @JonNelson.

Documentation changes

Build and infrastructure changes

Translation additions and improvements

• Thanks for translations:
  • @cyphra (Spanish)

New boards

• Adafruit P4GPIO. #10986. Thanks @tannewt.
• Espressif ESP32-P4X-Function-EV. #11004. Thanks @tannewt.
• NHB Systems JL401-S3. #10997, #10977. Thanks @NHBSystems.

Known issues

• The CIRCUITPY drive is not working on at least some STM32 boards.
• Native-code .mpy files are not working. This capability is currently enabled only on the winterbloom_sol board.
• See https://github.com/adafruit/circuitpython/issues for other issues, including issues still to be addressed for:
  • 10.2.x
  • 10.x.x
  • 11.0.0
  • long term

Thanks

Thank you to all who used, tested, and contributed toward this release, including the contributors above, and many others on GitHub and Discord. Join us on the Discord chat to collaborate.

The Moon has been helping humans determine the time for thousands of years. This clock from pjdines1994 in Instructables puts the moon back front and center. It uses the time and date to display the current phase of the moon. A nifty Steam-Punk aesthetic uses a Pi Pico W and a 3.7″ E-Paper display.

This clock displays

1. The current lunar phase
2. The current date
3. The high tide times for Whitstable (UK) harbor complete with heights.
4. The low tide times for Whitstable (UK) harbor complete with heights.

See the full guide!

Your feline friends are fond of the Moon but they’d rather be fed on-time! set some reminders with the MagTag Cat Fed Clock

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

#circuitpythonparsec
How to shift the character display buffer in CircuitPython.

code example
To learn about CircuitPython: https://circuitpython.org

Use a Trinket or Gemma to determine the IR codes from your remote and use the codes in your own program to trigger events

Trinket and Gemma are perfect for small projects needing to receive some external event, triggering your own defined output. This project uses the Adafruit IR Sensor to first receive IR commands from a remote, then to use those codes in controlling a project of your own.

To learn about IR signals and how they are decoded by a microcontroller, see the IR Sensor Tutorial from which this tutorial is based.

Many larger Arduino projects use the excellent IRRemote library by Ken Shirriff. This library allows for multiple protocols and is quite flexible. But it relies on hardware specific to larger Arduino processors. This project simplifies the process of obtaining codes and using them to scale to the limits of the Trinket and Gemma boards.

Check out the full guide!

NEW PRODUCT – Pimoroni Inky pHAT – 4 Color eInk Display – Red/Yellow/Black/White – PIM784

A low-energy, high-falutin, E Ink® display for your Raspberry Pi. Now available in a four-color version (red / yellow / black / white).

Inky pHAT’s beautiful, high contrast display is ideal for displaying simple graphics and crisply-rendered text and, because it’s like paper, it’s readable in bright sunlight. You could use an Inky pHAT as a cute little clock, displaying tweets, the weather, news headlines, sports scores, and more. It’s also ideal for graphing data from remote sensors, CPU load, or temperature, or stock prices.

The Getting Started with Inky pHAT tutorial is a great starting point for getting acquainted with the joys of e-paper!

Now in glorious four-color

Advances in e-paper technology mean we can now use a fancy new four-color display on Inky pHAT. You no longer need to choose between yellow and red; you can have both!

Features

• 2.13″ EPD display (250×122 pixels)
• Inky pHAT pinout
• Compatible with all 40-pin header Raspberry Pi models
• Python library
• Comes fully assembled

Multi-color EPD displays, like those on the Inky pHAT, use ingenious electrophoresis to pull coloured particles up and down the display. The colored particles reflect light, unlike most display types, making them visible under bright light. It takes approximately 20 seconds to refresh the display, with a typical 8mA current draw during refreshes. The black/white display can be refreshed much more quickly, in just a second or two.

Note that you cannot overlay/mix pixels: each point can be one of the four colors but you can’t like mix the red and yellow to make a orange. Instead, check out our guide on dithering!

Everything comes fully assembled, and there’s no soldering required! The display is securely stuck down to the Inky pHAT PCB and connected via a ribbon cable. Just pop Inky pHAT on your Pi and run our installer to get everything set up!

It’ll work with any 40-pin Pi, including Pi Zero and Pi Zero W.

The Python for Microcontrollers Newsletter is the place for the latest news involving Python on hardware (microcontrollers AND single board computers like Raspberry Pi).

This ad-free, spam-free weekly email is filled with CircuitPython, MicroPython, and Python information that you may have missed, all in one place!

You get a summary of all the software, events, projects, and the latest hardware worldwide once a week, no ads! You can cancel anytime.

It arrives about 11 am Monday (US Eastern time) with all the week’s happenings.

And please tell your friends, colleagues, students, etc.

Please sign up > > >

Ryan on I Code 4 Coffee discusses how to hack the firmware of hard disks and SSDs.

Over the years I had read a few posts/articles about modifying HDD firmware but nothing I could pick up and run with.

Regardless, I knew this concept wasn’t new and I just needed to find a drive that was easy to start messing with. At this point in time I just needed one HDD I could use to finish developing the Xbox 360 exploit and then I’d worry about trying to expand the firmware modifications to other makes and models.

Check out the details in the post here.

Bike Wheel POV Display

NeoPixel Bike Light

Playa Festival Bike

Soundboard Speaker for Bikes & Scooters

Ride & Rock – DIY Bike Stereo System with 20W Speaker

No-Solder Faux Neon Bike Lights

Circuit Playground Bike Light

Circuit Playground Bluefruit Automatic Bike Brake Light