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Welcome to the CircuitPython Show. I'm your host, Paul Cutler. This episode, I welcome

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Justin Myers to the show. Justin is a software engineer living in the Pacific Northwest with

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a passion for open source development and recently contributed the new Connection Manager

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library to CircuitPython. Justin, welcome to the show.

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Thanks very much. I'm glad to be here.

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How did you first get started with computers and electronics?

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So as a child of the early 80s, my family, my mom was really into it. We got a computer,

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connected to the Bulletin Board systems really early on.

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And so it's just something that was always there.

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And just gravitated towards it.

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It's always been something that's interested me

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and fascinated me.

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I remember the first program I wrote was from a--

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we had a Commodore 64 and literally coding out

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of a magazine.

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Had no idea what I was doing, just writing verbatim

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what was there.

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And then just kind of continued and was like, oh,

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can I make it do this?

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Can I make it do that?

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And then I've been doing that for the last 35

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plus years at this point.

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So that's how I got my started to programming that assembly code right out of a

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newspaper like magazine.

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And then I spent so much time on BBSs as well.

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How did you first get into electronics?

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Electronics was interesting.

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Like I'd always kind of dabbled at weird things, pulled stuff apart, what not, kind of

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looked under the hood, but didn't really do a lot.

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And then a number of years ago now, I don't even remember at this point, there was a

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a company doing a Kickstarter.

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And the company at the time was called Spark.

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It's now turned into a Particle, who

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I know has partnered with Adafruit on a few things

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and whatnot.

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But they had a Kickstarter out for these Wi-Fi dev boards

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that you could code and do over there updates.

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And I was like, that seems like a good thing to donate to.

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And so I donated to them.

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They're a Kickstarter or whatnot.

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And I got them.

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From there, I was like, oh, well, I've got these small chips.

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I don't know what really to do with them.

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And so I did some searching.

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And that's when I found Adafruit for the first time.

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like, Oh, I need more stuff. I need sensors, I need all of these other things. And then

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I just really started, you know, diving in and I kind of add different things and played

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with things and just kind of continue down that path for a while and built some, you

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know, small fun things to use

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and whatnot. And yeah, really just enjoy it. So how did

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you discover CircuitPython? Was it part of that process or something that came later?

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So I kind of watched it. So a lot of my development originally started in C, I'm now a Python

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developer for the most part, but kind of with that, so Arduino and everything made sense to me,

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it was really easy to kind of jump in. And then I saw when CircuitPython came out, and I kind of

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looked at it, I'm like, well, that's pretty limiting. And I just kind of walked away from it.

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I'm like, maybe someday. I think it's kind of when version eight came out, I had looked at some stuff

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and I was like, oh, there's, they've added quite a bit to this, you know, they've added some of

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their Wi Fi stuff to it and things like that. And I was like, no, this might be worth giving it a

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try. And so really kind of started digging in around there and then really started kind of

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playing with it more. At this point, I still kind of swap between the two, depending on kind of what

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I'm working on.

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Speaking of Wi-Fi, over the last year, you've been working with the underlying

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networking code in CircuitPython. What is Connection Manager and how does it make networking

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easier for users?

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I'll kind of step

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back one level, so to kind of where

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it kind of came from.

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So I joined Discord because I had a question about something

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and was looking and saw all this stuff, these users that

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was constantly just like, where they are here,

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like socket stuff, everything.

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And I just noticed there was a hole there

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and noticed when looking that there

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was a handful of other people that would help.

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And at that point, I had an airlift board

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and I had--

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I don't remember what it was at the time--

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an ESP S2 or S3 or whatever and noticed

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as I was playing with them, it was like, oh, wow,

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like these two things are totally different.

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Like there's no similarities between how you set them up.

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And so kind of through that, decided,

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kind of reached out to a few people.

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And I was like, hey, I think there's

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a better way to do this.

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And both, like whether using requests or like through Adafruit

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I/O, everything was separate.

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And so once you use more than one of the services,

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things really started getting complicated.

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How was your suggestion received on a better way to do it?

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I thought it was received pretty well.

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So basically, there was a session manager that was in requests that did a lot of this

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already.

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And so I had done a PR to basically kind of just separate that piece out in requests.

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And then from a couple people, they kind of mentioned like, "Oh, maybe we could break

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this out into its own thing."

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They were really, really forward kind of breaking it up and making it simple.

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In the end, Adafruit and specifically CircuitPython, right, they've got their goals, right?

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And so they've only got so many people and so many dollars to move things forward.

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So when people come up with a different idea to help and they don't have to do much other

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than maybe review some code, it seems like they're pretty pretty good know about being

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able to add it in.

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So you mentioned that there's a few different ways to get networking to work in Circuit

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Python with add-on boards like the airlift or was net or native networking.

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How does Connection Manager work behind the scenes?

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So in a super kind of like high level, right, so you like everything in the end is a radio,

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right?

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Like if you're using one of the newer boards, it's literally Wi-Fi dot radio

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If you are using the SP you're going to define, you know

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The SP SPI like you define that or same thing with the Wiznet and so the connection manager like in the end

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You just pass it a radio right and then it then goes

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Oh, what kind of radio is this and then from that it then does so before you'd have all these imports to be as you

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Needed the radio and the pool and the SSL stuff and so it goes

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Oh, it's this type of radio and so it'll then do the imports for you

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And so you don't have to think about that anymore, right?

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It's a single import for connection manager, and then it'll figure out what you need.

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There's different versions, depending on what version of the circuit Python you're on for

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like the WIS net that'll actually allow us to sell or won't.

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And so it just handles all that for you.

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So you just pass it a radio and then it can do everything.

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And then there's even a software defined radio if you're doing native networking.

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So if you're in C Python that you can actually use connection manager the exact same way.

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So you can actually write all of your networking code

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and test directly just in Python on your laptop.

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Like you don't even need Blink or anything like that

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if you're just doing regular internet connection stuff

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and you can use that to pre-write all of your code,

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which I now do all the time

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because my regular net's way faster

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than trying to do it on a microcontroller.

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- Oh, that's neat.

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I had no idea that you could do something similar

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in CPython with Connection Manager.

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- Yeah, it was like, and especially as I was testing stuff,

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like that was kind of a big part of it

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was, OK, pulling out an airlift and kind of trying

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to work through this stuff and make sure it works,

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especially when you're trying to work

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through multiple connections and things like that.

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They're small chips.

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They're not super fast.

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And so especially trying to iterate and things like that

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makes it a lot harder.

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So changing that and everything, and especially

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when I do bigger projects and things where I'm doing things

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like, say, OAuth through Google or something like that,

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having a connection that is strong and stable

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and I'm not going to run out of sockets or anything like that.

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was really helpful.

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- What kind of challenges did you encounter along the way?

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- Kind of the biggest one.

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So I, as I said, like I started a lot of my

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serious development in C

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and even did some things in some memory constrained areas.

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And so was originally very familiar with that,

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but then as the years went by

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and I no longer had to compile my own special Linux kernel

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for my web hosting and everything,

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and like CPU and memory and all of that stuff

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was just enormous and free, right?

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Like you had as much as you wanted.

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Like I think with a lot of people,

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my programming style got, I wouldn't say lazy,

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but not as far focused.

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And so kind of one of the biggest things was as

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working through this was, oh yeah,

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I'm now on a constrained device again.

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And not only that, right?

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Like not only memory and CPU and speed,

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but these can only do so many connections, right?

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You can only have a few before they just run out of memory.

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Whereas I can open a socket, hundreds of sockets all day long on my laptop.

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So kind of re-going through that switch and trying to think through it for all the devices and everything like that.

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It was a good challenge and a good remembering of like, oh, be a little bit more focused.

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And I've even now re-implemented some of that stuff in my daily life to be, you know, think through a little bit more performance level,

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you know, taking the extra time to think through that.

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Very cool.

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As part of creating Connection Manager, you developed a testing framework.

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Tell me more about the framework.

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Yeah, so kind of one of the big things was, so after the initial part of Connection Manager

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was created, still realized there were a bunch of different ways to do things.

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For example, there was one way to get the IP address from the native radio and a different

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way to get it from the, say, the airlift.

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And so I wanted to go through and make sure all of these things worked, especially as we moved

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stuff around. And so kind of built this testing framework that I could plug in any chip and then

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run this set of tests and it would go through and go. It would even detect the radio that it

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had connected to it and then go, "Oh, great. You're on a WISNET." And then it would run through a

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series of just standard tests to make sure nothing broke. It would go through all the different

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things you know HTTP, HTTPS, it would connect to NTP for time, it even you know run a micro server

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to basically go check and it was basically like did any of this break? Like the goal was always to

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actually have something and hopefully someday I might try to push this down the line again but

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like as they come out with new versions. So like another big part of it came out because we were

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right between eight and nine for CircuitPython and they were you know making some changes or

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we break that? Like, because we'd see, I'd see someone testing, they're like, oh, this

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isn't working anymore. And so it was kind of like trying to build something to go, oh,

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does all of this stuff work? It kind of, you know, built out of that. And like, ideally,

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it would be something that somewhere, like whenever they do a release, these things would

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get run, right? Because we see with every release, like sometimes we'll see, you know,

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whatever it is, 0.7. And then like, the next day, 0.8 comes out because you have some regression

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that some user finds. So if there was some way to build some testing framework around

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it, I'm definitely not in their build system or anything like that. But it was something

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that I could do to kind of test to make sure things weren't breaking or whatnot. Also help

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find all the ways that the different radios were different. So we could slowly work towards

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getting them so they're all the same.

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Do I want to know how many different boards you ran through those tests?

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I know we're not on talking

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only, but I'm going to adjust my camera just so you can

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see it, that whole stack there is almost as tall as me.

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It's so it's all my electronics gear.

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I probably have about 50 different boards at this point that are all different.

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Ran it through all of them, which obviously is painstakingly when a new

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release comes out and you've got to go download 50 firmwares and update

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them and everything like that.

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And then of course, then my router started having problems because I had too many

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connections to it because everything was connected and everything.

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Sure.

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It's always something.

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Yeah.

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It's always something.

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So last question I ask each guest, you're going to start a new circuit

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Python or microcontroller project.

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Which

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board do you reach for?

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So this is always a hard question.

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Like I love asking this in a very different thing when I'm interviewing

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somebody, like if you were to build a new thing, what software would you use?

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And my goal is always to find out like, is this person a.

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I'm a hammer and everything's a nail type of person or are they not?

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So it really depends on what you were doing.

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So good solid Wi-Fi and everything like that good powerful chip if that's what you're looking for

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The sp32 s3 is one of the ones that I use often

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If I am doing something specifically

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That is more bluetooth focused

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the nrf52 series, uh, so that

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Adafruit has the bluefruit sense. I really like that board. That's really a fun one

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It has a couple sensors on it and things like that

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And if I'm not doing any sort of Wi-Fi and I just need something that's nice and strong,

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like I really enjoy the M4. It's been around for a while. It's a pretty powerful chip. It's got

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floating points. I do a lot of stuff with like math and things like that. And so having that

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floating point processor, I actually built a library or ported over a library for determining

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declination that Noah has built out. And so having that, the floating point makes it a lot more

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more accurate and things like that.

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I've started diving a little bit more into the Pico series,

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but in the end, still not my favorites.

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I recently did get a 2350 and I'm going to play with that one.

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I think the hardest part of that is since I do do a lot of

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CircuitPython and it can't take advantage of the dual processor,

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the dual cores, it's like,

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"No, I get a lot of something that I can't quite use."

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>>

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Right.

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>> I keep hoping that there's a way to run a second,

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Arduino something on the other core that just sits there and listens, and then you can have this

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powerful, "Go do this math!" and then do my easy coding in CircuitPython. But someday.

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Someday. Justin, thanks so much for making time and coming on the show.

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You're quite welcome. I enjoyed it.

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Thank you for listening to The CircuitPython Show. That's a wrap on Season 5. I hope you

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enjoyed the new topic-based episodes in addition to the interviews. Show notes and transcripts are

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There are links to follow the show on Mastodon and Blue Sky in the show notes.

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When the show comes back, I'll share it on the socials.

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Until next time, stay positive.