April 29, 2019 is the sixth ‘birthday’ of MicroPython. At the April Melbourne Meetup, Damien George, creator of MicroPython, delves into his archives and shows the earliest code and notes about the goals of the language. The material pre-dates the first git commit! Listen in as Damien reveals how and why the language began and evolved. It’s a nice way to celebrate MicroPython’s sixth birthday!
Here is an excerpt from the initial notes. The title is “Python board” and the date is 29 April 2013:
Python board 29/4/2013
The smallest, cheapest python.
A piece of hardware that is small and cheap, runs python scripts, and has good low-level access to hardware. If we can do it with a single chip, that would keep it small and cheap. Need then something with a large amount of flash and a decent amount of RAM, that also is cheap enough. Atmel SAM’s have order 1MiB flash and 128KiB SRAM, for around $10 one-off.
Main features:
Implements Python 3 core language.
Flash presents as a flash drive with vfat filesystem.
Put python scripts on flash and it runs them (maybe have a (multicolour?) led that flashes on error and writes a “core” dump to the flash). This led can also double as a user output led.
Can run multiple scripts on once.
Our strength would be small, cheap, simple, easy to replicate.
Can have a range of boards with different features. But all must be basically compatible and capable of running the same scripts.
Happy Birthday MicroPython! Thank you Damien for creating something special and open!
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