Limor Fried, an engineer and founder of New York’s Adafruit Industries, said in an email exchange with EE Times that her company has seen an evolution over the past several years where large scale commercial projects are using Arduino boards with more appealing form factors, such as the Adafruit Feather.
“Every product made now needs wireless or IoT connectivity and battery power management, something that Feather is designed for, while maintaining Arduino IDE compatibility and embedded Python support,” Fried said.
Looking ahead, Adafruit’s Fried said the future will see more hardware using derivatives of the Python programming language such as MicroPython or CircuitPython rather than Arduino.
“Why? For one thing, microcontrollers are inexpensive and overly powerful,” Fried said “We’re not forced to use 8-bit at 16MHz chips anymore. For the same price we can pick up a 72 MHz ARM Cortex M4. That extra processing power can be used to speed up development and avoid frustrating debugging. Higher-level programming functions like exceptions, memory management, text parsing support, networking libraries, and type-flexibility make Python great for IoT products.”
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: MicroPython Pico W Bluetooth, CircuitPython 8.0.4 and much more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
