Dear community,
as some of you might have recognized already, we are doing more things with MicroPython recently. Coming from Use realtime systems for reading digital sensors, we needed a place to move information to, so we are just starting this thread here.
With kind regards,
Andreas.
Our community recently is heading towards MicroPython, as @tonke and @RalfL ² had good experiences with it. While the system might not be ready for audio sampling yet as recently reported by @Ron, we are pretty confident it could actually work out for reading the regular digital sensors. However, we haven’t heard about any detailed observations from @vinz and @Diren as they are also doing MicroPython we learned recently, see Develop BOB on FiPy - #29 by Diren.
So, while reading sensors directly from MicroPython might be too slow for doing high-frequency (audio) sampling, it might be deterministic enough to get deterministic readings from the usual suspects of digital sensors.
Modern MCU modules based on the Espressif ESP32 SoC we are using here provide a cheap and capable runtime for the FreeRTOS system, programmable through the Espressif IoT Development Framework (ESP-IDF).
Pycom is using the ESP32 SoC for their product line and added MicroPython into the mix as Adafruit is doing the same with their recent devices programmable through CircuitPython, see also ESP-IDF and beyond: Lua with NodeMCU, Pycom's MicroPython fork and Adafruit's CircuitPython.
Currently, we are using hardware from Pycom¹ as the core MCU module for different variants of our reference hardware.
If you are interested in this, you might enjoy reading about our current efforts where we made a start by pulling together various bits of source code from different sources as a Hackbrett for all people from our community. We will be happy to get you started on this.
With kind regards,
Andreas.