GD3X with Adafruit CircuitPython

As I mentioned last week, I ordered a couple of Adafruit Metro boards to see how difficult it would be to get Python driving the Gameduino 3. The answer is ... not very difficult at all. As soon as SPI was running, it was as easy as copying the Python 3 libraries onto the board's USB filesystem:


The CircuitPython development environment is brilliantly simple. You just copy the source files onto the 2 Megabyte USB drive, and CircuitPython detects that they have changed and auto-reloads them. This is so much easier than the Arduino, and it's even easier than MicroPython itself, which (as far as I know) doesn't support auto-reload. This is the code:

def helloworld(eve):
    eve.ClearColorRGB(0x00, 0x20, 0x20)
    eve.Clear()
    eve.cmd_text(20, 20, 30, 0, "Hello from CircuitPython")
    eve.swap()

That's a promising start. I'm going to look at performance next.



In other news, both SPIDriver and I²CDriver sites have been given a makeover, so they look quite smart. As part of this both now have quite comprehensive user guides:

• https://i2cdriver.com/i2cdriver.pdf
• https://spidriver.com/spidriver.pdf

This is all quite fresh, so if you do see anything inconsistent or missing, please let me know. Thanks!

The Gameduino 3X production has started, so in a few weeks GD3X will ship. I'll have more updates on this next week.