Complete Your Hardware "Weekend Projects" In An Actual Weekend With Belay

Summary Working on hardware projects often has significant friction involved when compared to pure software. Brian Pugh enjoys tinkering with microcontrollers, but his "weekend projects" often took longer than a weekend to complete, so he created Belay. In this episode he explains how Belay simplifies the interactions involved in developing for MicroPython boards and how you can use it to speed up your own experimentation. Announcements Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great! When you’re ready to launch your next app or want to try a project you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so take a look at our friends over at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s easy to get started with the next generation of deployment and scaling, powered by the battle tested Linode platform, including simple pricing, node balancers, 40Gbit networking, dedicated CPU and GPU instances, and worldwide data centers. And now you can launch a managed MySQL, Postgres, or Mongo database cluster in minutes to keep your critical data safe with automated backups and failover. Go to pythonpodcast.com/linode and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! The biggest challenge with modern data systems is understanding what data you have, where it is located, and who is using it. Select Star’s data discovery platform solves that out of the box, with a fully automated catalog that includes lineage from where the data originated, all the way to which dashboards rely on it and who is viewing them every day. Just connect it to your dbt, Snowflake, Tableau, Looker, or whatever you’re using and Select Star will set everything up in just a few hours. Go to pythonpodcast.com/selectstar today to double the length of your free trial and get a swag package when you convert to a paid plan. Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Brian Pugh about Belay, a python library that enables the rapid development of projects that interact with hardware via a micropython-compatible board. Interview Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Can you describe what Belay is and the story behind it? Who are the target users for Belay? What are some of the points of friction involved in developing for hardware projects? What are some of the features of Belay that make that a smoother process? What are some of the ways that simplifying the develop/debug cycles can improve the overall experience of developing for hardware platforms? What are some of the inherent limitations of constrained hardware that Belay is unable to paper over? Can you describe how Belay is implemented? What does the workflow look like when using Belay as compared to using MicroPython directly? What are some of the ways that you are using Belay in your own projects? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Belay used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Belay? When is Belay the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Belay? Keep In Touch BrianPugh on GitHub LinkedIn Picks Tobias Gunnar Computer Glasses Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other shows. The Data Engineering Podcast covers the latest on modern data management. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Links Belay Geomagical PIC Microcontroller AVR Microcontroller Matlab MicroPython Podcast Episode CircuitPython Podcast Episode Celery Potentiometer Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi Pico ADC Converter Thonny Podcast Episode Adafruit Pyboard Python Inspect Module Python Tokenize Magnetometer Project Lidar The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA