I’m on a plane to San Francisco to attend the Wikimedia Foundation’s all hands meeting. Somewhat to my surprise, I’m starting a full-time remote job with the Foundation this week.
california, nonprofits, travel :: p1k3 / 2019 / 1 / 27
I’ve been spending a decent chunk of my paid time in recent months on the CircuitPython ecosystem, doing things like testing libraries against Adafruit-Blinka, a shim that mimics CircuitPython’s core modules on Linux systems.
(For background: CircuitPython is a fork of MicroPython aimed at educational users, beginner hobbyists, etc., with full-time development staff sponsored by Adafruit.)
The community’s been asked to write some stuff about hopes for the language in 2019:
As 2018 comes to a close we like to reflect on how the year went and set goals for 2019. In the last two years (2017, 2018) this has been a blog post by me (Scott aka tannewt). For 2019, we’d like to do it a bit differently. This time we’d like everyone in the CircuitPython community to contribute by posting their thoughts to some public place on the Internet.
I guess I’ll start with some reflections on my experience in 2018 and then list some thoughts about where things are headed. None of this should be taken too seriously — my role on this one is that of a low-level software bureaucrat, and it’s an extremely safe bet I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Python and I have always been sort of an uncomfortable fit. I’ve used it here and there — Ansible stuff for configuring web servers, one-offs like a static HTML image gallery generator — but I’ve never warmed up to it much. I never got over the whitespace thing, and the claims of “executable pseudocode” that hover around the language strike me as more than a little exaggerated. Anyhow, I have shell and Perl for small-time utility scripting, and the large projects I’ve worked on have mostly been PHP. So for one reason and another, until recently I’d probably written more lines of, say, QBasic or vimscript than I had Python.
Still and all, I’m well past the point in my working life where I’m capable of feeling anything like love for most software. Grudging toleration is about the best I manage these days. And it’s clear that Python has a set of virtues in the space it occupies.
The syntax is for the most part easy to grasp, modulo the brittleness of indentation and a few other infelicities. The built-in collection types (lists, dicts, tuples, sets) aren’t as easy for a beginner to use as something like PHP’s swiss-army-knife of an array type, but they’re also much less conceptually muddled. The language seems to encourage a straightforward procedural style with some light object orientation on top. Even if this isn’t exactly considered cool, there are far worse ways to program.
In fact, Python’s aesthetics are often relentlessly un-hip, which is probably a useful bulwark against the violently unmaintainable cleverness that infests so many language cultures in 2019.
Packaging isn’t a lot of fun to figure out, but it basically works once you get the right boilerplate in place. PyPI is a mess, but as other language-specific package managers & repositories have shown us repeatedly, it could be substantially worse.
I think most of my substantive ongoing concerns with Python are around the way bugs seem to proliferate on type boundaries, the tendency of code to spew exceptions all over the landscape in conditions the developer didn’t quite anticipate, and the swampy nightmare that is the ongoing 2-to-3 version transition. (Some of these are mitigated to an extent by the smallness of most CircuitPython codebases, and the 2-to-3 problem is sidestepped by way of aiming only for Python 3 compatibility.)
Very broadly speaking, Python’s problems are mostly in classes of problems shared by that family of dynamic, garbage-collected interpreted languages that came to prominence in the 90s and early 2000s: Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, etc. By the same token, Python shares many of the positive qualities of its relatives. There’s a vast set of undertakings that are essentially painless in these languages and excruciating in an environment like C / C++ / Arduino.
All of this to say: I was initially skeptical, but it seems like a Python is a reasonable thing to build a hardware development ecosystem around.
Plug in a board, get a USB drive you can drop code onto and a REPL you can access over serial.
Ten years ago this would have blown my mind, and in 2019 it still feels like kind of a revelation. In most ways, it’s a vast improvement over the ergonomics of the Arduino-style compile-upload-debug cycle. If you mess around with hardware and haven’t tried this, it’s worth playing with.
…but it’s real close. At this point, I’ve written CircuitPython code for:
Of these, it feels like the SAMD21 boards just don’t have enough RAM to do much that would require more than one driver library. For instance, I recently offered to build my dad a remote thermometer for his pump house. The Feather M0 LoRa boards seem like they should be ideal for this, since all I need to do is read a temperature sensor on one board, transmit it, and display the temperature on the other end. I just couldn’t seem to get the headroom to import, let alone use, both Adafruit_CircuitPython_RFM9x and a driver for any of the several displays I tried. Ultimately I gave up on CircuitPython for the project, and plan to complete it in Arduino / C++ with the RadioHead library instead.
I had similar experiences when working up the Glitter Positioning System and an as-yet undocumented USB pedal-input project. In those cases, I wound up switching to the Feather M4 Express, and the contrast is dramatic. The SAMD51 feels like a Real Computer for this use case, with enough memory to easily handle a LoRa radio, GPS unit, LSM9DS1 9-DOF, and an RGB LED ring for display output all at once.
At the low end of the available hardware, you can glimpse the platform’s possibilities and do some basic projects, but there’s a good chance you’ll be frustrated trying to go anyhere beyond that. At the higher end, it’s eminently possible to do real work.
This brings me to the Raspberry Pi, where (strictly speaking) CircuitPython doesn’t run, but the project as a whole has quite a bit to offer. Adafruit-Blinka is a shim that aims to provide most of the core CircuitPython modules on some common small-board computers with GPIO pins, which means that CircuitPython drivers and helper libraries can be used from regular CPython 3.x. At heart, it’s a collection of hacks, but this nevertheless feels like a game changer for a certain class of hardware projects on small Linux systems. It’s trivial to use a lot of this stuff, and that in turn opens up a ton of connections to the rest of the stuff you can do with a high-level language in a Linux environment.
At a time when it’s nearly impossible for most users to exercise any control over most of the computing hardware in their lives, this sort of thing feels like at least a small step in the right direction.
Having a code of conduct, doing most development work in the open, welcoming beginners, involving the user community in code review, etc.: In general I think this is a commendably well-managed software project, and plenty of FOSS efforts could learn something from the overall tone it takes.
On the negative side, I actively dislike Discord with its CPU-eating Slack-but-for-gamers vibe, and I continue wishing that GitHub were not eating all public-facing software development, but I recognize the accessibility these platforms afford and acknowledge that my side of these questions is presently in a state of utter defeat, so I won’t spill any more virtual ink on the subject in this context.
Ok, so some notes on stuff I hope to see improve on the scale of about a year:
Stability: Things are much better than when I first tried CircuitPython, but there are still glitches to reckon with. Occasionally a board will have to be power-cycled to get code to run correctly. Connecting to the REPL over serial sometimes hangs mysteriously or prints a bunch of garbage. Things (unsurprisingly) get downright wacky when you run out of memory. The USB mass storage stuff exhibits some unpredictable behavior—writes sometimes fail without much observable rhyme or reason. I’m sure all of this will get better; this is in many ways still a young project. Still, there’s a lot of usability to be gained just by making the whole thing a couple of notches less flaky.
Asynchronous processing / multitasking / parallelism / event handling: I have no idea what shape it should take, but people keep wanting some kind of paradigm for handling asynchronous events in something closer to realtime, and I don’t think they’re wrong to want it. It’s remarkable what you can accomplish just by polling inputs in a tight loop, but sooner or later you want something better. Smarter people than me hash some of this out in this GitHub issue.
CPython compatibility: This is an explicit goal of the project, so I don’t think there’s much danger of it getting lost in the shuffle. I do think it’ll improve things the closer it gets to 100%.
Linux platforms: Right now, the Raspberry Pi is still more or less the only first-class citizen in terms of Adafruit-Blinka support. It’d be great to see a couple of other stable, widely available platforms added to that list.
Library management: The experience of installing modules for use on the
Raspberry Pi is, perhaps oddly, a lot less painful than installing them on
CircuitPython boards, since you can just use pip3. It’d be interesting
if there was a nice clean way to use PyPI for dropping libraries into place
on the CIRCUITPY drive or in a project directory. (Maybe this is handled
by tools like Mu? I should know, but I don’t because I keep just
using Vim.)
Security and privacy: The way things are going, there are eventually going to be a lot of network-exposed microcontrollers running some Python variant. Some of the people responsible for those systems will be experienced software professionals, which means that they’ll do as well on this front as software professionals usually do (i.e., completely terrible, but many of them will know that security is a consideration and when they use the tech to violate your privacy they’ll usually be doing it on purpose).
I’m not, however, convinced that the rest of CircuitPython’s target demographic is equipped to reason about these problems at all. As embedded systems continue getting smaller, more powerful, and more ubiquitous, this is going to matter more and more. The organizations and projects teaching people how to put computers in everything need to start thinking a lot harder about how dangerous it is to put computers in everything, and communicating that danger to the people they teach. I’m not sure what form that takes with CircuitPython, but I know that it should be on people’s radar as the platform expands to more devices that handle wifi, bluetooth, LoRa, etc. Particularly given the security track record of web projects built on similar languages.
Community involvement: Right now, this is an Adafruit joint, through and through. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’ll be interesting to see whether it ever truly makes the transition to something that a bunch of different orgs and individuals outside of the Adafruit bubble are involved in. I think that’d be a good thing, but there’s an inherent tension between the kind of tight control that’s built this project according to a well-defined plan and the diversified set of inputs that give projects like this a life of their own well beyond the interests of a particular company.
Anyhow. That’s probably enough rambling for one post. To reiterate, I probably don’t know what I’m talking about.
adafruit, circuitpython, glitter-positioning-system, hardware, python, technical :: p1k3 / 2019 / 1 / 21
Bug #1477667 finally landed in Firefox 64, which means that discovery and subscription features for RSS / Atom feeds are gone now. This means that if you have a blog or other site that offers a feed but doesn’t explicitly provide a visible link to it, your users probably don’t know it exists. If you care, now might be a good time to add such a link.
It also means that you as a user won’t know about feeds, unless you install an extension. My solution for the moment is to use Livemarks and manually copy feed URLs into NewsBlur once I know they exist. This is suboptimal, but it works for now. (The extension’s main purpose is to restore livemarks functionality, i.e. the thing where you could add a feed as an automatically updated bookmark folder, which can be kind of handy.)
I first got mad about this particular feature deletion, to no avail, back in July. Google’s Chrome, of course, got rid of feed-related features ages ago, and I’ve been mad about that for a while.
If you’re using Chrome, you can get feed subscription features back with this RSS subscription extension.
firefox, google, syndication, technical :: p1k3 / 2019 / 1 / 2
I’m waiting for the train. It’s raining out, it’s been raining all day. You can’t of course definitively say this is because the planet is warmer, just like you couldn’t definitively say that global warming is a big fakeout if it happened to be a world-beating apocalyptic blizzard outside. But it’s raining on December the 26th, and it’s doing the same thing 120 odd miles north of here where I grew up, and you can have thoughts. Much like you could have thoughts a couple of years back when it was 70° on Christmas Day and there were severe thunderstorm warnings. How many points on the graph define a trend? What the fuck happened to winter?
I talked with an older relative a couple of days ago. He brought it up; he always brings it up. He wants to talk about it: Nothing is wrong, the Ogallala aquifer is recharging naturally, it doesn’t really matter if some little stickleback minnow goes extinct, ecological concerns are a pure scam, these environmentalists are just lining their pockets by colluding with malevolent bureaucrats, etc.
This is precisely why we’re fucked. For him, it’s not an unfortunate side effect that humans are killing everything so much as it’s the entire point and purpose of human life. It’s not generally put so nakedly, but the killing is how you’re supposed to live and anyone who stands in your way is deluded at best and probably a kind of criminal. The failure to destroy everything you can is the purest folly imaginable; the idea that anyone might know a better way is pure hubris.
Of course in this view the world is made for human use, and is in some important sense illimitable. It doesn’t matter that in practice the world has limits. The understanding won’t change. No new data will affect the model. He loves his grandkids and would go to nearly any length to ensure their happiness, but nothing that happens in his remaining years will ever make him grasp that we’re all burning the world they’re going to inhabit.
❂
I’m drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon. “16 FLUID OUNCES”. The 16oz tallboy is, let’s be clear about this, a bad idea. Beer of this quality and temperament is meant to be consumed cold, and cannot possibly stay cold at this rate of consumption (the rate dictated by “I’m nursing this series of shitty beers so I have something better to do than sit around the train station”) for more than 7 or 8 of the 16 available ounces.
I used to work in one of the buildings around here. Back in the before time, when it still snowed in the winter. Since then I have moved to another state and the baleful gaze of the serious development money has fallen on this section of town. It was, as per usual, better as a half-developed post-industrial former warehouse zone with much of the real estate barely occupied at all. Not that it was good, exactly, just that it was less of a glaring polished nullity full of gastropubs.
agriculture, beer, climate, nebraska, travel, weather :: p1k3 / 2018 / 12 / 26
I’m transiting between an edge-condition town that used to be nowhere at all and a rural interior that still is. This leg of the trip is a flight between Denver International Airport and Omaha. Beneath the plane the pivot irrigation circles stretch out in either direction, growing more snow-dusted as we leave the immediate shadow of the Rockies. Soon we’ll cut across the sandhills, these latter looking, as we approach, like a dark inversion of the feathered crystals of ice growing across the surface of a pond.
Seeing red: The unethical practice of redlining in Pueblo - Opinion - The Pueblo Chieftain - Pueblo, CO — «Recently, I uncovered a map of Pueblo from the National Archives, made in the 1930s, that highlighted my great grandmother’s neighborhood in Pueblo with a shade of red. The map categorized the neighborhood as “hazardous.” The map's accompanying document noted Elm Street's “Italian concentration” and its “conglomeration of foreign industrial workers.” It also stated: “The houses are cheap, old, and run-down. Sales are almost impossible in this section and loans will not be made therein.”»
Introducing Darkstar: A Xerox Star Emulator – ENGBLG
13 Prompt Expansion (zsh) — «Prompt sequences undergo a special form of expansion. This type of expansion is also available using the -P option to the print builtin.»
lotabout/skim: Fuzzy Finder in rust!
Git - git-sh-setup Documentation — «The git sh-setup scriptlet is designed to be sourced (using .) by other shell scripts to set up some variables pointing at the normal Git directories and a few helper shell functions.»
Rich’s sh (POSIX shell) tricks — «This page is meant as a repository for useful tricks I’ve found (and some I’ve perhaps invented) for scripting the POSIX shell (with some attention to portability to non-conformant shells as well, scattered here and there).»
Make WordArt - Online word art generator
How to add custom git command to zsh completion? - Stack Overflow
Rhye: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert - YouTube — They're _really_ leaning into the flickering LED candle thing on this one.
The Man in Seat Sixty-One - the train travel guide...
Her Left Hand, The Darkness | Alison Smith | Granta Magazine — «I never contacted her to tell her how much she’d meant to me. I thought it would be too much of a bother, that any moment in which I managed to catch her attention would be a moment away from her work. And perhaps I still thought of her as a god. Like a god, she was fixed, undying, a permanent feature in this ever-darkening world. The day before she died, I had spent my morning walk talking to her in my head, arranging and rearranging the words I’d say to her when I finally found the courage to approach her. I thought she’d always be there, waiting for me to stop fetching plates of fruit from the hors d’oeuvres table and to finally take a seat beside her, open my mouth and speak.»
ervanalb/rainbow-vomit: Stupid simple WS2812 driver — "Maybe Adafruit or Sparkfun will steal my design and mass produce it. That would be cool."
Someone please cancel 2019 already? - Charlie's Diary — «The former, convergence of common goals, is a broader category (cover-ups are one very specific example). One may look at the way all the tobacco companies pushed the junk science about smoking not causing cancer between the 1900s and 1970s. Or the way that all petrochemical resource extraction corporations fund outlets that downplay climate change. It's not an actual conspiracy with an organizing committee and an agenda, it's just that they all stand to lose a mind-bogglingly vast sum of money and power if they don't follow certain policies.»
Der Spiegel Made Up Stories. How Can It Regain Readers’ Trust?