Pycon.us sprints

[dwight.hubbard]

This year's pycon.us already has a micropython sprint for the microbit listed and we've discussed adding other micropython related work to the sprints.

Of course sprints aren't all that interesting if there's nobody else to work with. So, some micropython things I'd be interested in working on in the sprints are:

• Finish the micropython-redis package (lists, keys, connection and server command groups are implemented, need to implement the rest).
• Add support to the micropython-redis package to access a redis over serial port (for devices without wifi)
• Add modules that use the micropython-redis module to implement remote variable storage (like the redis-collections module provides), message queues (like the hotqueue module provides) and publish/subscribe.
• Getting the emscripten port functional, with dhyland's assistance I managed to get emscripten to build micropython but I never got it to actually work and that was several months ago so any work would need a full rebase to pull in more recent changes.
• General cleanup and documentation work, on the esp8266/wipy ports would also be interesting.

[pfalcon]

Great ideas. Don't forget that we also have a list of low-hanging fruits for people interested in contributing to MicroPython core: http://forum.micropython.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=779 .

[Andriod]

I'm not here for the sprints, but I am at the conference with an ESP8266. There's an IoT open space I'm looking forward to.

[dwight.hubbard]

We did a micropython openspace the first day of pycon talks and there was a lot of interest in both the microbit and the various wifi enabled devices. Especially the ESP8266.

In hindsight it would have been nice if we had some cool looking demos to show at the openspace ahead of time though.

I'm not here for the sprints, but I am at the conference with an ESP8266. There's an IoT open space I'm looking forward to.

[dwight.hubbard]

I was frankly amazed that the micropython related sprinting on the first day had more people than many of the other sprints. I think it really shows there is a lot of interest in micropython, once people find out about it.

This year's pycon.us already has a micropython sprint for the microbit listed and we've discussed adding other micropython related work to the sprints.

Of course sprints aren't all that interesting if there's nobody else to work with. So, some micropython things I'd be interested in working on in the sprints are:

• Finish the micropython-redis package (lists, keys, connection and server command groups are implemented, need to implement the rest).
• Add support to the micropython-redis package to access a redis over serial port (for devices without wifi)
• Add modules that use the micropython-redis module to implement remote variable storage (like the redis-collections module provides), message queues (like the hotqueue module provides) and publish/subscribe.
• Getting the emscripten port functional, with dhyland's assistance I managed to get emscripten to build micropython but I never got it to actually work and that was several months ago so any work would need a full rebase to pull in more recent changes.
• General cleanup and documentation work, on the esp8266/wipy ports would also be interesting.

[pfalcon]

Thanks for organizing and leading it! We definitely think that MicroPython is worth to be known more widely in the general Python community, as it offers scale-down path for Python programming, which, thanks to growing IoT, isn't less important than scale-up (clouds, parallelization, etc.). It's especially important because MicroPython isn't the first scaled-down Python implementation, and without wide community involvement, we risk going the same path as they (unfinished, under/unmaintained). So, we really need help with popularizing MicroPython, so please stay around .

[dwight.hubbard]

I just got home from Pycon.us 2016, so a quick follow up.

The first day of sprints where insane, between the microbit sprint being run by Nicholas Tollervey and my sprint working with other boards running Micropython we had a large number of people. We completely ran out of both Microbits and ESP8266 boards to loan out (we had 10 of each), which doesn't count the boards that some people brought with them. At one point I counted 31 people, which I'm pretty sure is as many or more people than where sprinting on popular established projects like Django.

I personally didn't get any time to work on sprinting on the micropython things I'd planned to work on since I spent most of my time helping others but I think that was in many ways more beneficial and rewarding anyways.

Thanks for organizing and leading it! We definitely think that MicroPython is worth to be known more widely in the general Python community, as it offers scale-down path for Python programming, which, thanks to growing IoT, isn't less important than scale-up (clouds, parallelization, etc.). It's especially important because MicroPython isn't the first scaled-down Python implementation, and without wide community involvement, we risk going the same path as they (unfinished, under/unmaintained). So, we really need help with popularizing MicroPython, so please stay around .