Shiny New CircuitPython 8.0.0 Alpha Brings New Board Support, Bug Fixes, and More
Offering support for new boards, including Adafruit's latest ESP32-S2 Feathers, CircuitPython 8.0.0 is ready for testing.
CircuitPython, Adafruit's educational fork of the MicroPython project, is preparing for its milestone 8.0.0 release — and the first alpha is now available for testing.
Launched in 2017 as a fork of MicroPython 1.8.7, CircuitPython quickly became a popular alternative to its upstream inspiration thanks to baked-in support for a range of Adafruit devices — plus a tighter focus on educational and hobbyist use. Each new release typically brings with it ports to new microcontrollers and development boards and additional functionality, and CircuitPython 8.0.0 is no exception.
The upcoming release will, its developers have confirmed, include support for the new RISC-V-based Adafruit ESP32-S3 TFT Feather and ESP32-S3 4MB Flash 2MB PSRAM Feather boards, the Cytron Maker Zero SAMD21 board, the Invector Labs Challenger RP2040 LoRa board family, the MixGo Ce, and the WeAct Studio Pico. These come in addition to fixes for bugs in Adafruit Circuit Playground Express and Metro M0, Invector Labs Challenger NB RP2040, LILYGO TTGO T-OI PLUS, Solder Party RP2040, SparkFun STM32 Thing Plus, and Swan R5 board support.
Other major changes include: New behavior for the AnalogIn function, which will now offer a full range from 0 to 65,535 instead of having zeros on low-order bits; putting the OneWire function into its own library; dotenv support, for setting os.getenv() values in a .env file; the removal of gamepadshift in favor of keypad.ShiftRegisterKeys; and the new TileGrid.contains() function, designed for bitmap slice handling.
More details on the new release are available on the project's GitHub page, where full source is made available under a mixture of open source licenses; pre-compiled firmware for particular boards is available on CircuitPython.org, though anyone looking to test the build out is advised that it is alpha status — and should check out the GitHub Issues for potentially project-breaking bugs.