Crossing the Streams with CircuitPython by @aallan @hacksterio
Crossing the Streams with CircuitPython – Hackster Blog by Alasdair Allan –
It’s been an interesting year for micro-controller boards. We’ve seen a dramatic drop in the price of computing, along with the long anticipated collapse in the diversity of board form factors, the rise of the FPGA, and the new availability of RISC-V chips making ripples in the market.
Intriguingly, though, it seems that this year was also the year where high-level languages on low-level hardware took off. Which is why the appearance of Adafruit’s CircuitPython on a new board from SparkFun is far more important than it might seem on the surface. Because, like many of the early signs we’ve seen this year, this board may well be a leading indicator of things to come.
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It’s been fascinating to see the maturing ecosystem around the use of Python on micro-controllers. Because I’m starting to think that, with our hardware now ‘good enough’ to do most of what we need, the next generation of micro-controllers will be defined, not by the hardware, but by their user experience. Because high level language support brings more accessibility, and a better user experience, and that can only be a good thing.