Dear community,
Welcome to the second issue of the MicroPython Newsletter!
The hardware
Last week we announced the new, upcoming pyboard D-series and that it would hopefully be available in the next few months. We have now found solutions to most of the logistic issues we were facing and are trying to get this board manufactured in bulk as soon as we can. If all goes to plan we anticipate kicking off production of the PCB in the next couple of weeks, and assembly would follow after that.
The software
On the software development front: in addition to ongoing enhancements and new features, we are still finding small but important optimisations in various parts of the core code. In the last week some minor reduction to the baseline code size was made, as well as reduction in RAM usage for generators, and frozen bytecode with big integer constants.
The original pyboard PYBv1.x or PYBLITEv1.0 have single-precision hardware floating point, and this is the default mode for the firmware. But did you know that you can also install firmware that uses double-precision software floating point? This will run floating point arithmetic a bit slower, but in case you need the extra precision more than the speed this is now a possibility. You can also try out preemptive multithreading on the pyboard by installing special firmware and using the `_thread` module. You can try something like `_thread.start_new_thread(my_func, ('arg1', 'arg2'))`. To download these different firmware mages go to https://micropython.org/download/#pyboard. Note that there's no harm in trying this firmware, your filesystem will not be touched and you can easily revert back to standard firmware (also available at that link).
Events
In March we held a MicroPython workshop in Berlin and got people excited about MicroPython and the pyboard, which you can read more about here: https://pyladiesberlin.github.io/blog.html. And last weekend the pyladies in Berlin had a booth at pydataberlin, where they used pyboards to show off their MicroPython knowledge, see https://twitter.com/PyLadiesBer/status/ ... 4860719104.
There is a London MicroPython meetup on 9th July! Make sure to drop by at the MicroPython meetup, if you are in the London area today: https://www.meetup.com/London-MicroPyth ... 251679691/
From Damien and the MicroPython team.
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