Sam Blenny

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

Sam Blenny to the show. Sam is the author of more than 30 playground notes on Adafruit's

Learn Playground with topics including 3D printing, the Adafruit Fruit Jam, Zephyr, and

more. Sam, welcome to the show.

Hi, good to be here. Thanks for having me.

How did you first get started with computers and electronics?

As a little kid, starting in the 80s, then going on to the 90s as I got into middle school

and high school, I was from a musical family, so there were lots of choir and orchestra

concerts and musicals and plays and things going on around me.

And I spent some time entertaining myself, waiting for rehearsals or whatever.

And during all this, I noticed they were using lots of interesting equipment, lights and

sound and microphones and mixers and lots of stuff.

And so that caught my attention early on and I was always interested in that.

And then another thing that sort of got me going early on electronics was, you know,

this was back in the 80s and we actually shopped at shopping malls.

And so, you know, you'd go in through one store and you'd have to look at all their

stuff and then you'd have to go past all the other stores to get to the thing you were

actually trying to find like in the middle somewhere or whatever.

So we passed by the toy display at Radio Shack a lot as we were just going about our business.

And I always was sort of interested in that.

And that led to further interest in electronic project lab kits.

I'm pretty sure I got a couple of those for Christmas at different years in the Forrest

Mimps books and all that stuff.

So this was like early on setting the stage.

There were electronics around me and I found those interesting.

And for the computers, we got a hand-me-down Atari 400.

This was back in the 80s, and had it hooked up to a black and white TV, and that was the

ones with the keyboard.

So it was an 8-bit computer, not just a video game thing.

And it had ROM Basic and Facemaker and Frogger and probably, I don't know, some Asteroid

thing.

I don't know.

So that got my attention.

And there was also desktop publishing stuff around me for the music people, because, you

know, if you're doing a musical, you've got to have a program.

And so somebody has to make the program.

And if you've got this computer with the desktop publishing, that's a lot easier than doing

it by hand with, I don't know, copy and paste and typewriters and all that.

So people got pretty excited about the Macintosh desktop publishing stuff with the old laser

writer and whatnot.

Then we had a Mac 5 12K E at home, so there was some Dark Castle and Crystal Quest and

Mac Paint and MacWrite and those things.

So that was just setting the stage.

Then come the 90s, I got kind of serious about all of this.

People knew I was interested in things, so I'd get hand-me-down equipment and old computers.

I had a RadioShack TRS-80 Model 100 with ROMBASIC,

and that was a pretty pivotal thing.

I spent a lot of time there.

And so TRS-80 ROMBASIC spent a lot of hours on that.

And then at some point I got a Turbo C compiler,

and by that point it was maybe a Mac Plus

or maybe it was still on the 512k.

I think it was a Mac Plus.

And then I had some old PCs that ran MS-DOS,

And so that got me going on QBasic and I did a lot of programming for school stuff.

I had a hard time with algebra.

I got sick.

I don't know, it was maybe like seventh grade or something.

I got sick and missed one week when they went over something and it was just blowing my

mind.

I couldn't figure it out.

And then at some point, somebody got me this book and I got started like doing some graphs

and things in QBasic.

And it's like, "Oh, so that's what functions do."

It's like you put this number in and you do this math and you put that number and then

you make a pixel there and then you get these curves.

And somehow in school that just never made any sense to me.

But when I got going in QBasic, it was like, "Oh, that's what this is."

And so a lot of my experience with computers in middle school and high school is it's a

thing that has extended my ability to understand stuff.

And this was all like pre-internet.

Most of this was pre-internet at home before the like scourge of AOL CDs, like carpet bombing

everything and it's before all that.

So it's like reading printed manuals when that was a thing and looking, figuring out

how to do stuff for books and a little bit of bulletin board.

So that's what got me going on computers and electronics.

And then there's a third component of this, which was really significant to me, was my

high school didn't have FIRST Robotics, but a friend from across town did.

And one time I got to visit them and that was another sort of mind blowing, "Oh, this

thing exists.

Why didn't somebody tell me this earlier?"

kind of experience.

And I got to help them debug some of their code.

I think they were having troubles with the dead zone on their joystick or something,

because it was an actual analog joystick.

And that was kind of more important with that.

So I learned about these basic stamp microcontrollers and that was a life-altering experience.

And that was all a long time ago.

Much has happened since then.

How did you discover CircuitPython?

So if you do anything with I2C sensors for whatever purpose and you're reading about

them, it's pretty hard not to come across Adafruit stuff.

Adafruit drivers are going to come up if you start searching for things.

And so I'd been aware of that for, I don't know,

I don't even remember when.

And then I think maybe about eight years ago

or sometime around then,

I was trying to do some data logging stuff

for indoor plant things.

I wanted to know what the temperature was

and make some graphs.

I used, I can't even remember which board,

but it was one of the boards that is capable

of running CircuitPython.

And I used some sensors,

I don't know if it was Adafruit sensors

or SparkFun sensors, but at that time,

I was researching a lot of what was on the market.

And so I probably, I can't remember,

this is when CircuitPython wasn't all that far along

and it was a lot more Arduino things.

Ever since then, I had been paying increasingly

more attention to what Adafruit was up to.

And then last year I got going on the circuit Python stuff a lot more seriously.

You've written over 30 Playground Notes on Adafruit's Playground sites.

A number of them are about Adafruit's new RP2350 powered

microcomputer, the FruitJam.

Tell me about the GamePad tester and how you started working with the FruitJam.

Okay.

Yeah.

So with the playground guides, I enjoy technical writing and I had been watching the Ask an Engineer show.

I follow Adafruit stuff on YouTube fairly regularly and PT, aka Mr. Lady Ada on that show, he mentioned that they were doing all this playground guide stuff, that they built this system and they were hoping to get writers interested in putting content there.

and I thought about that and I was like,

yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

I'm gonna do that.

And so I did that and I started off just doing some projects

with the boards I had on hand

and I have a limited parts budget.

I don't let myself just spend wildly on this.

So I started off with what was laying around

and eventually that worked out to doing a game pad tester

on an ESP32 S3 with the TFT display,

the little feather boards.

And I think they may have mentioned that on their Asking an Engineer show.

And then later I did this pumpkins and skeletons game on that same board and

they thought that was interesting.

And so I had, I had this conversation going by email with BT and then at some

point it was like, Hey, this fruit jam board, you want a prototype?

You want to do some projects with it?

And I was like, yes, please.

That sounds awesome.

And so they sent me one of those and they had mentioned that it would be

interesting to have a USB gamepad tester for Fruit Jam. And I was like, yeah, that'd be good.

So I did that. And because it has the USB host and the DVI display, it's possible to do a lot

more than with the little tiny squinty little display on the feather. That's so hard to see.

Like you can get it with a camera to put it in a guide, but you got to get your lighting careful.

Like you got to do the side lighting carefully so that the display doesn't wash out the exposure on

rest of the board and it's all so tiny and if somebody tries to do it, they're like,

"Wow, the screen is really small."

But if you use the DVI output on the Fruit Jam, you can just put it on a monitor and

plug in a gamepad or a keyboard and it's just fabulous.

That's how I got started on that.

What about the USB host MIDI tester?

So the Fruit Jam thing, you know, if you look through my Playground Guide author page, there's

like fruit jam this, fruit jam that, fruit jam the other thing. And it's kind of, I do one project

and I go, "Oh, there's this other thing I'm curious about, but that's too much to put in this

one because I got to write this up and I want to have it finished in a reasonable time. So put it

on the list of things to do next." And you know, one of the obvious things, once I had gotten the

game pad stuff sort of figured out, I was like, "Oh, what about MIDI?" And you know, like as I

said, I come from a musical family, so I'd been aware of MIDI since, you know, a long time ago.

And, you know, it's always been kind of interesting.

And it's also a pretty good stress test for the USB stack because you have to pull because

of the way things are set up with this to get MIDI input.

You got to pull and you got to pull fast and you also have to do the display updates and

there's all this stuff going on.

It's like, yeah, this would be a good stress test.

And so I did that.

And yeah, it worked out pretty nice.

One of the things that I enjoyed doing with that is since I had so many pixels to spend,

I made a grid of USB channels and notes.

So you can see as you blink on it, which channel stuff is coming in on and which note number

it's coming in on.

And sometimes, like if you're doing a percussion thing or a keyboard, you won't necessarily

have the note range mapped where it needs to be for the software instrument that you're using.

And so you like you you'll bang on stuff but you're on the wrong octave so nothing happens or

you know it can be confusing. So it's nice to have stuff like this where you go "oh that's what's

going on". What about the Fritjam color checker? So one of the things that came up when I was

working on that pumpkins and skeletons game or maybe maybe it was the original USB tester that

that I did for the Feather ESP32 S3 TFT thing.

I had made my sprites for display IO tile grid using,

oh, I can't remember the name of the app,

but one of the iPad apps for working on pixel art,

or maybe I used something on Linux.

I can't remember, but it was on a color managed display

using 24 bit colors,

and I just picked out some stuff that looked good.

And then when I got it onto the display and I looked at it,

I was like, whoa, that is not color matched

to what I was doing, what happened?

That had puzzled me and I couldn't really figure out

what was going on.

And at that point, I didn't understand

that when you're doing the eight bit color

or the 16 bit color, which can happen with display IO,

depending upon the hardware and how you initialize things,

that you're actually getting RGB 332.

So three red bits, three green bits, two blue bits, I guess.

And then there's all this quantization and filling

of the low bits when it gets moved

to actually display on hardware that uses more colors.

And then there's the 16-bit version of that,

where you have RGB 565, 5-bit, 6-bits, 5-bits.

And what you really want, if you're

doing a color match thing is RGB 888,

but that's not how these displays work.

And I didn't understand that until I did

that Fruit Jam color checker thing

and really worked through it

and tried out the different video modes

and saw what it did.

That process for me was about how do I get sprites

that have the colors that I want

when I'm trying to make a little thing that uses sprites?

And so people who are trying to make games for Fruit Jam,

if they understand that the RP 2350 is doing these things

when it does the DVI output,

then they can make sprites with colors

that they'll end up being happier with hopefully.

And like one of the things that can happen

is they can be dimmer

because the hardware does a zero fill

when it does bit extension to go from,

say five bits up to eight bits,

you get zeros on the low bits,

which means things can be darker.

- For CircuitPython's upcoming 10.0 release,

you've done some work to improve USB host.

What kind of improvements have you been working on?

- So as I was doing all this stuff

and playing with all these gamepad things

and all I noticed in the MIDI stuff,

sometimes there would be a dropped note or a stuck note,

or as people are building things

with the USB host on Fruit Jam,

you definitely need to catch exceptions.

There will be exceptions.

There'll be timeouts because not all USB devices

will answer you every time you ask them for something.

You have to pull them

and they won't always have something ready

and then you'll get the timeout maybe, or maybe not.

Maybe you'll get something with like zero bytes.

So you got to check, otherwise your code won't work.

And then if somebody unplugs a device

or if certain other things happen,

you may get a USB error exception.

And if you don't check for that,

you won't have any way to know when the,

when somebody unplugged something.

So hot plugging won't work.

So as I was in particular trying to get hot plugging

to work reliably,

I noticed that there was some stuff

that I couldn't do anything about at the Python level.

And I wanted to get to the bottom of it

so that people could just, you know,

plug stuff in and have it work and, you know,

not have to worry about all that nonsense.

And so I got on a little quest to try and figure out

what was actually going on.

I made some issues on GitHub and I did a PR and Scott did a PR and we managed to track down and

fix. One of the things was that there was a bit of an impedance mismatch between the TinyUSB

library underneath and in CircuitPython that was using TinyUSB. They didn't quite agree on

some of the error handling. Like there were things that could come up from TinyUSB

that CircuitPython would treat as if it was something else instead of, you know, the right

error condition. I'm a little fuzzy on the details. The way I handle all this stuff is like,

you know, I write it down and then I move on with my life. But the basic idea was there were some

error codes that weren't being checked for at the interface between TinyUSB and CircuitPython. And

that was over my head and Scott sorted that out, which is related to some other things that had

been having DMA trouble. I think it's if the DMA is coming, if it's to or from the SRAM that's on

the RP-2350 itself, everything's cool. But if you're trying to use the PSRAM chip that's external,

then things can get weird. And so if you don't prevent the PSRAM from getting included in a DMA

transfer, you can have strange things happen. And we were having strange things happen and

Scott figured out how to fix that.

Well, that's pretty cool. I'll make

sure I link to some of those PRs in the show notes as well. Last question I ask each guest,

you're going to start a new project or prototype, which board do you reach for?

Scott Trent (00:36:40): It depends. There are a lot of

reasons why you might want to do one thing over another. Maybe you're broke or you've got a big

parts pile that your wife or someone is wanting you to clean up or you know what

there are reasons why it makes sense just use the thing you have if you're

just messing around and you got some stuff use what you have there are times

when you need to hit specific functional requirements like say you want to do

something to monitor plants and it's going to be potentially exposed to

moisture like if you put things outside where it's not temperature controlled it

It may be not out in the rain and the snow,

but there's gonna be condensation

because there's gonna be so much temperature change

and you're gonna have to account for,

okay, I need to put a dust cap back in there.

And when you're in that kind of a situation,

you need to think about your requirements.

Like if this is gonna run a battery,

how long do I need to go before I can charge

or swap the batteries?

What does that mean about which boards I should use?

Like the ESP32 variants do quite well on low power.

but they're not all the same. And then say, "Okay, I want to do solar." Then you're

going to have to think about, "Well, I need a battery and I need a charger, but which

board that can run on a battery is compatible with a charger?" And that will narrow you

down to a couple things. Like, Ladeata has introduced recently some feather boards that

have a jumper on the back that you can cut. It'll be like CHG or charger or something.

and you cut that and it pulls the normal feather charger out of the circuit.

So then you can use one of the solar charger boards and it won't burn anything

up. So that's just kind of a,

an engineering thing and that's how I think it's like sometimes it doesn't

matter. Then you can understand your requirements are do whatever you want.

And then sometimes other things do matter. You've got a budget, you've got,

you know, maybe you've got a deadline, you know,

Maybe it makes sense to spend more and get something done fast, or maybe you need to

make a lot of them.

So you really need to think about how much it costs, or maybe you have some weather thing

that you're like, you need to make sure it won't get wet and die on your second day out

or whatever.

So it depends.

Sam, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.

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