Episode 11 Transcript
Welcome to the Bootloader, I’m Tod Kurt. And I’m Paul Cutler. Tod and I each have a couple of
interesting things to share with you, and you’ll want to stay till the end of the episode for a
special announcement. But first we have a special interview with Debra Ansell. Debra is known
for her work with LEDs and you can find her at geekmomprojects.com. She also goes by Geek Mom
Projects on Instagram and Mastodon, which I’ll link to in the show notes. Debra, welcome to
the show. You were at Teardown 2024 this past June. Tell me about Teardown.
Hi, Paul, thanks. And it was a wonderful experience. I still have, you know, warm fuzzy
flashbacks to moments that happened there. So I’m really happy to talk about it. It was
unreservedly the best MakerCon I have attended. Now I haven’t attended a wide variety of them,
but I’ve attended a number. And I think there were a confluence of factors that made it such a fun,
enjoyable, stimulating, welcoming event. So that’s an open ended question. But I’ll start with
for people who don’t know what Teardown is, I strongly recommend finding and maybe you can link
to this on your website, an interview that Helen Leigh had with David Groom about what Teardown is
and what goes into it, because she gives a really good explainer from an insider’s perspective. So
I will probably, you know, misstate the purpose of it and all that. But from my perspective, it was
a place to go, bring some projects, find people who are interested in similar projects or might
have different interests, but that are in the same world space that really are happy to talk about
them and want to share them and, you know, meet like minded people and kind of see what’s going
on in the community in person where you can have real conversations one on one or in small groups.
And it was a really wonderful combination of attending talks, hanging out with friends who I
had a group of friends whom I knew would be there, meeting new people from a wide range of backgrounds
and circumstances, and, you know, meeting some people I’d met only online and meeting some people
I’d never met before. And there were some people who didn’t know about it and came last minute who
I would like fit in perfectly there. I’d mentioned the talks, there were workshops, there were
people, there was great food and drink that Helen took great pains to source from interesting local
restaurants in the Portland community. And there was a chance to explore Portland. They took great
care to not only have, you know, talks and presentations during the day, but provide events
over the couple days before and the day after and evening events where we could all kind of unwind
and hang out in slightly different spaces that give you a chance to see the local environments.
And, you know, hang out in a fun place that was a little different. So you’re constantly getting to
see a little bit, things that are a little bit new, explore Portland with, you know, people who may
not know it either, and talk tech, but in interesting ways.
What was one of the highlights of the city of Portland for you?
The highlight, in an interesting way, they went out of their way to create a geocaching style
scavenger hunt event, which they put a tremendous amount of effort into, and I think was very clever
and not everybody was into it. I like a little game like this in a competition so that you ended up
divided into teams and you had to run all over Portland to pick up these clues, which they were
magnets hidden to whatever magnetic thing they could find in various landmarks all over the city.
Now, it turns out our team, not so good at the clues, but incredibly persistent. So we probably
went about three times the mileage that you were supposed to do.
Sure.
And we were actually conventioning and complaining a great deal, but it was a great bonding
experience. It was actually, it was, I knew none of the people on my team super well. And by the
time we came out of this, what probably should have been a much shorter event than we made it, we
had bonded tremendously over this whole chance to run around Portland, look for these clues, decode
these puzzles. And again, not everybody was into it. And we certainly lost a few people along the
way, but got a certain sense of satisfaction out of finishing with this group. And I learned about
the bridges in Portland, which are maybe the nice ones, and which is that apparently there’s
different colleges in there. So I thought that was a fun way to integrate the city into the
convention. And also they had scheduled, for example, a dinner the first night at Autodesk that
is near to where Tear Down was. And the convention itself took place in the Lloyd Center, which is a
semi-abandoned mall. And that in and of itself became kind of a character in the convention,
because it is semi-abandoned, but in this weird, wonderful way that there are a few, there’s an
Annie’s Pretzels and there’s a, there’s probably a Cinnabon somewhere. And those typical mall
staples, and then a lot of empty storefronts that locals, that you can rent for cheap. So locals
have taken it over and there’s like, they’ve converted one retail store into a roller skating
rink. You like look inside the storefront, there are people roller skating in circles, and there’s
still an ice skating rink downstairs. So it’s this kind of interesting, wonderful fantasy location
that you could, you’re in a mall, and I grew up in the 80s in malls. So maybe that’s personally
resonant with me. For me in particular, it was a lot of fun because I, it was in a converted GAP
store. And I had recently made a batch of denim jackets as my most recent project of illuminated
LED denim jackets. So they were perfect as an installation in a GAP store. And I got to display
those too. And I got to use the GAP theme in my, instead of GAP kids, it was GAP LEDs.
Oh, that’s awesome.
It was fantastic and not my idea. I have to give Allie, my friend Allie, who was there, all the props
for coming up with that idea. And she said it and I said, wait, that’s perfect. And she helped me
style my display and made it fun. It let your imagination run wild a little bit. It was a
character. It was a presence in and of itself to be in this mall at this convention.
That’s very cool.
Yeah.
Speaking of the mall, what were some of your favorite installations at Teardown?
Well, of course, I’m partial to the LED installations. And Ben Henke, with the help of
Claire Cassidy, put together a wonderful Pixel Blaze demonstration with all the wonderful things
you can do with Pixel Blaze LED controller. Jason Coon, you know, who’s a good friend of mine, a
good maker friend, brought a number of his Fibonacci boards and put together. And it was nice
because you get, you got a reserved space in the GAP store. So his went up across a wall and that
was the LED lounge area. So they were, they had put beanbags and a sofa beneath it. So you could
lounge surrounded by beautiful LED art installations. And then I got to meet and talk to
somebody who had only briefly really talked to before, Aisha, and I cannot pronounce her last
name, who does wonderful LED PCBs and gave a really great talk there. Oh, and a friend of mine,
Charlyn Gonda, who is, goes by Charlyn online, had brought her LED jewelry, a subset, but it’s
still wonderful and amazing to look at. So that’s the LED overview. And it was all wonderful. But
there were also other fun things like somebody brought an electron microscope, which I didn’t
have a chance to check out, which I’m sorry I didn’t, but showed people how to use it. Somebody
was showing, I guess it’s not as much an installation, but it was, it wasn’t a workshop.
They had a wire bonding machine and I had never seen, you know, people wire bonding, you know,
dies on, you know, tiny, tiny PCBs before. And that was fun to watch. So I’m sure there’s much
more and I’m, I may pop up with something in the middle of this interview, but, but it was
actually really fun the way you were kind of lounging amongst all the installations. And yeah,
I was certainly drawn to and appreciative of all the LED art that was there.
We were chatting before we started recording about the vibe of the convention.
What were some of the other things that, that fed that vibe?
I give all the props in the world to Helen Leigh, who really poured herself, heart, mind, and soul
into organizing it. And Josh Lifton, who I think runs CrowdSupply for letting her run with it. And
also obviously doing a lot to make it work as well. But from the beginning, Helen, you know,
she worked, clearly worked very hard on it and reached out quite early to people to say, you
know, we’re looking to create this inclusive, diverse, interesting, welcoming environment.
And you do have something to contribute. So she set a tone and an expectation early.
She ambitiously, you know, took on a venue that didn’t come with wifi or anything built in,
but obviously spent a lot of time thinking about what could work and did a very good job of it.
Because Teardown last year was at Portland State University. So this was a new venue for them.
First of all, the first step was the expectation setting that this is a place for everybody.
Like, you know, do you know anybody who maybe hasn’t spoken before who’d like to,
do you know somebody who has, who doesn’t get recognition for what they do, who should,
you know, be displaying here. And so it was clear from the beginning that this was going to be a
welcoming environment, whether or not you’re a big name or, you know, very casual hobbyist with an
interest. And that was really nice. And it was designed with conversation and connection in mind
very clearly from the layout of the spaces by building in lounge areas where people could sit
and talk to building in gaps in the schedule that were really, for me, who, you know,
I get a little overwhelmed being in large crowds of people for a long time.
I could either talk to people or I could kind of just duck out and have like a few moments
to myself without feeling like I was missing too much. I appreciated that on both fronts.
The time, the space, the planning of events, of social events afterwards that, like, you know,
I mentioned, you know, going to Autodesk for a big party for planning this, you know, these team
geocaching hunt all over Portland for planning a meeting at a video game bar that made it very
easy to engage with others and like, you know, something of interest to kind of everybody. And
for me, you know, there’s some people who just want to go and talk nothing but tech,
which is great too. You could certainly do that, but it gave you other interesting things to look
at and comment on too. So it put it all in kind of the context of you’re in this city that is a
great place to be. And let’s all bring all these projects and topics that we love together here,
but let’s also interact with, you know, the community around us, or at least, you know,
find out what’s interesting in the community around us while we’re here. So it’s engagement.
There’s a lot of engagement, a lot of planning. It was nicely planned and nicely announced. So
you knew what was going to happen at any moment. There was no trying to figure things out. A lot
of space was provided. I think what also contributed to the vibe was it was a conscious decision
at Teardown, for example, not to have badge hacking, because while it’s, you know, it’s a
wonderful and exciting event, I’m not sure why they did this. This is my take on why not having
badge hacking was actually a positive in this circumstance is it can introduce a level of kind
of competition and one-upsmanship that was absent. And it also can drive people to kind of work
solo, which again, they produce amazing things. And at the end, it’s very cool,
but really the events were designed for communication and connection. So I think
that was purposely omitted from the roster. So yeah, a lot of factors were just kind of
well thought out. And I think to also went to great lengths just to make people feel included,
as I mentioned to you, I think before the show, you know, a great icebreaker. You know,
when I go to a convention like this, I always feel like I’ve found my people because you always have
something in common to talk about. And my big icebreaker question is if I don’t know what else
to say, so what are you interested in? What do you like to do? Because people always have a good
answer to that. One of the people I asked said, you know, I’ve just been interested in learning
about programmable electronics. I didn’t know anything about it, but I was told to come by
and, you know, learn about them here. And so complete newbie, but he had a great time.
He was, and people were really happy to talk to him. You know, every maker I’ve ever met is super
happy to talk about what they’re doing and show it off. So it was, you know, he had a great time
listening to people and people were happy to encourage him and to give him tips to, you know,
where he might go to pursue his interests. So it just felt like it was kind of an equalizer
because there were also some people, there were people with pretty big YouTube followings who,
you had maybe a parasocial relationship with them, but it was, you know, but you got a chance to just
kind of talk to them and they’re normal people too, just as much as the guy who’d never done
a single electronics project, you know, by himself. And yeah, you just had this feeling
that kind of everybody was in the same space, sharing the same experiences.
That is awesome to hear. What a great conference.
Yeah. Yeah, it really was wonderful. Really had a great time. And it didn’t hurt that
some of my favorite makers who I do know and adore were there and we just brought the party,
but it was a party that everybody was really happy to engage in. So, you know, it was great.
And I’ll link to some of those makers in the show notes as well.
Debra, thanks so much for being on the show.
Oh, Paul, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Thanks to Debra for that interview. Teardown sounded like a really good time.
Yeah, I was bummed I wasn’t able to go to this year.
It sounds just like a great group of makers there between Charlyn and Jason Coon and Ben
Henke, I think was there, she said. Yeah, all the cool folks.
Yeah, all the folks that I would want to actually meet someday. So I might have to put this one on
my bucket list as well. Yep.
What’s your first one for us this episode?
All right. So you know me, I’m all about the DIY synth stuff.
I’m a big fan of synth libraries for microcontrollers. Some of my favorites are the
Mozzie for Arduino synth library and CircuitPython’s Synth.io. But I’ve also used the Teensy Audio
Library, which is sort of the standard bearer for a lot of the good audio projects out there.
And there’s also Daisy, the Daisy Seed, which is like used in professional products.
And there’s others. But all of them have the problem of, you know, how do I get things wired
up to make sound? Because they’re a library. They’re not a physical thing. And then once you
have something that actually makes sound, it still requires a good amount of programming
and synthesis knowledge to make something that sounds cool.
Well, there’s this project that’s been around for a while called the Tulip Creative Computer,
and it tries to solve some of these problems. And it solves a bunch of other problems too.
But the main one is like, how do you make music? I’ve been following it for a while,
and lately it’s gotten really interesting. It’s a ESP32 based device you can buy right now for
60 bucks. It includes a seven inch touchscreen, high quality audio deck, MIDI I/O, a battery,
and yeah, ESP32 processor on it. It runs a custom version of MicroPython,
and it’s set up so you can plug in a USB keyboard and just start typing into it directly. You don’t
have to have a computer to program it. You can program it by itself. And because you’re, you
start out with just the REPL, the MicroPython REPL, it’s sort of a live coding music environment.
If you want it to be like the Sonic Pi project, which is really fun by the way, if you have a
Raspberry Pi and want to make music kind of live coding, I highly recommend trying out Sonic Pi.
But unlike the Sonic Pi, there’s no hassle of getting a Raspberry Pi running.
Because it’s a microcontroller, it just starts up instantly. It’s just kind of cool. But wait,
there’s more. Did I say it’s a device? It’s actually a fully open source project,
and you can build one yourself if you’ve got an ESP32 S3 board and a touchscreen.
And the Tulip designers provide a bunch of guides depending on what specific hardware you have.
So you can like kind of cobble together from parts you might already have in your
shoebox full of electronics to make your own little Tulip thing. There’s also a
desktop Tulip emulator if you want to try it out just like on any computer that runs Python.
And to get back to the synth libraries, on the physical microcontroller side,
Tulip uses the Amy synth library, AMY, which is the C library that has bindings in both Arduino
and Python. And it’s a really interesting take on a synth library in that it doesn’t
try to be super low level. It mostly tries to say, “Here’s a bunch of synthesizer recreations
with patches you can just load up.” So you don’t have to like hook things together like a modular
synth the way you have to do in Mozzie or Synth.io. You just like say, “Load up this DX7 sound,” and
you get to play electric piano or whatever. And it’s got drum machines and a bunch of other things.
You can go low level if you want, but by default, you don’t have to. So I have a Tulip coming.
Should be here maybe next week. And I’ll include links to all this in the show notes.
I watched the video that we’ll link to, and you didn’t even touch on one of the cooler parts. So
you start off at the REPL, but then you just hit an icon in the lower right-hand side of the screen,
and you can choose from different modes. You can put it into synthesizer mode or drum sequencer
mode. So to your point, you don’t need to know the libraries and the coding to actually make
that happen. If you do, you get that level of control, but they also have a UI for all of that,
which I thought was really interesting. Yeah, and the way that it’s set up is that
you can have all these functions, the drum machine function, the synthesizer functions,
kind of all running in the background, and you can still have the REPL controlling it.
Like you essentially controlling it via MIDI, or MIDI as in quotes. If this was a video,
you’d see my fingers going wiggle wiggle. It’s really interesting because in Arduino and
CircuitPython, to rewire the synthesizer, you essentially stop the synthesizer, rewire it,
start it back up again. But in the Tulip case, while it’s running, you’re kind of unplugging
it in real time and reloading things and changing it and stuff. And so it’s really interesting.
I can’t wait to play with it. Yeah, for 60 bucks, how can you go wrong?
Totally right. That was my number one. So Paul, what’s your number one this week?
I’m going to go back to the well on code editors. I didn’t know that I had a thing for testing code
editors, but apparently I do. After previously talking about JetBrains fleet way back in
episode three and recently covering the CircuitPython online IDE by River Wang, I have two
more to share. First up is ViperIDE, an online IDE for MicroPython and CircuitPython, made by
Volodymyr Shymanskyy, I hope I pronounced that right. I apologize if I didn’t, who is the co-founder
of BlinkIO, an IoT cloud platform. Like other browser-based solutions, ViperIDE requires Chrome
or Edge because it requires web serial to work, which isn’t available in Firefox or Safari.
One of the really innovative things about it is that you can connect your boards via USB like you
would expect, but there’s also support for web REPL over the internet or local network, Bluetooth,
and P2P WebRTC support. It includes features you would expect in an IDE, including syntax
highlighting for Python, JSON, TOML, and more, and it has a viewer for markdown files and can
auto expand and minify JSON files just like a big IDE would. You can also install it as a
progressive web app so it looks and feels like an app, not just a browser or browser tab. And it
includes a terminal, and I’m putting quotes around that. What you really see is the REPL, the serial
console. Unlike any of the web editors who do have a serial printout, this includes that, but the
terminal also allows you to interact with the REPL, which is really cool, and I haven’t seen it in
another online IDE. It’s definitely MicroPython-focused. For example, there’s buttons for
soft reset and hard reset, which is handy, but the hard reset button doesn’t work in CircuitPython
as it calls the machine function used in MicroPython to reset it. It also includes support
for MicroPython’s package manager right in the IDE, making it simple to import libraries.
It’s running MicroPython compiled to WebAssembly right in your browser, and you can even try it
with an emulator in your browser as well. It’s really well done. I’ve included links to a review
from Les Pounder at Tom’s Hardware and Mr. Shymanskyy’s recent visit to the PyCast show as well.
Next up is another editor called Zed. Zed’s been around for a little less than a year for macOS
and just recently released a Linux version, which is how it caught my eye. This is an editor in IDE
for folks who miss Atom or Sublime Text and don’t need all the features of a full-blown IDE,
like features found in VS Code or PyCharm, like a profiler, for example.
Zed is from the creators of Atom, and it’s also open source. Right from their home page,
here’s how they describe Zed. Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor,
and unrelenting performance keeps you in the flow and makes other tools feel slow.
You’ll note I said “multiplayer” in the description. It includes the ability for
multiple developers to collaborate and edit code together within a shared workspace,
which is similar to JetBrains Spaces. If you’re collaborating with someone, it has the ability
to jump to your teammate’s location right in the code and vice versa, and has a built-in screen
sharing tool. There’s a few things it doesn’t have, such as Git integration, but if you’re
comfortable at the command line, that’s really not a big deal. It also doesn’t automatically pick up
Python virtual environments. You have to edit a JSON configuration by hand and point to the
location of your virtual environment. And then one other thing that I did discover that was
interesting is that it uses pyright as a linter right out of the box. pyright is a static type
checker for Python, and I opened my big web app with built-in fast API and had all these squiggly
lines with pyright telling me that all my code was wrong, and I did a double-take. I’m like,
“No one’s telling me my code’s wrong,” so I was digging into what pyright is.
But if you’re an intermediate to advanced user and you’re okay at the command line and just want a
fast code editor, check out ZADD. I’m giving it a chance as my daily driver, and so far I’m really
liking it. Yeah, I’ve been running it for a couple weeks now, using it to edit CircuitPython and
Markdown files. And yeah, it’s fast and pretty easy to set up. It kind of reminds me of Sublime
Text, but like Sublime Text from five years ago or whatever, when it was simpler. It’s definitely
a lot simpler and faster than VS Code, which has become a bit ungainly to me. There’s just too many
extensions now, and it’s like there’s too much choice. The paradox of choice for like, “What
should I do? How should I set this up?” Whereas Zed’s a bit cleaner. It comes with a lot of
code syntax highlighting and code linting built in without you having to set up anything. And I only
had to do a couple of little tiny configuration changes to make it so that I could use the
CircuitPython stubs with it. So yeah, it looks pretty good. Yep, it’s written in Rust, which I
think really contributes to the speed. I probably should have mentioned that as well. Nice. What’s
your next one? If you’ve been reading the Hackaday blog recently, you might have seen this article.
I was very happy to see that my friend Leah Buechley was mentioned on Hackaday recently.
She’s a professor at the University of New Mexico, and for the last few years has been applying C&C
and advanced mathematical techniques to ceramics and clay, creating shapes and overhangs and angles
and structures that I wouldn’t think possible in clay, let alone 3D printer plastic.
They’re using these commercially available 3D clay printers, which I didn’t know existed,
but they’ve augmented them with special tricks, sometimes with special algorithms to feed
the slicer, sometimes with special formulations of clay. And if Leah Buechley’s name is familiar,
it’s because she’s also the creator of the LilyPad Arduino sewable electronic system
from about 15 years ago, and the echoes of which, the round PCB with big pads,
you can see in the Circuit Playground Express boards that are very popular at Adafruit.
So the recent thing that she came out with, her and her team, is called Cerametal. It’s a way of
3D printing metal on the desktop using a custom metalized clay. And once it’s printed, it’s fired
in a kiln, and it gets centered into a solid metal part. So you just have like a standard,
like tiny 3D printer, you print out this clay onto a platform, and then you put that into the kiln,
and it becomes a metal object. Like, what? So this custom metal clay is just made from metal powder,
xanthan gum, and a few other ingredients, and you just mix it together in a literal, like,
kitchen stand mixer. To slice the model that they want to print out, they couldn’t use a standard
slicer like Cura, because the clay, once you start extruding it, you can’t stop. It just kind of
keeps coming out because of the way that the mechanical materials of the clay works. So they
had to create a new slicer that supports this continuous extrusion. And so it’s sort of like
vase mode. If you’ve ever done vase mode in 3D printing, it’s sort of like that, but it will do
fills because they want to, like, make a filled object. And the print resolution is pretty
impressive. They can do a 0.6 millimeter nozzle and 0.3 millimeter layer height, which is pretty
comparable to a standard 3D printer. The cost is around 2k. That’s for, like, basically half of
that is for the printer, half of that is for a kiln. And when you compare that to, like, the 50k
to 130k for an SLS, Selective Laser Sentry Machine, that’s pretty darn cheap. And you’re doing this
all on your desk, you know? A desk, and then you take it to a kiln. And, but one of the more
interesting things to me, like, so I’ll never do this because, you know, I don’t play with clay,
but I think it’s really fascinating that you can make metal objects now. In their slicer,
they use an algorithm called Fermat Spirals to fill in the spaces, because one of the
characteristics of the Fermat Spiral is that it guarantees that the area between the lines
are equal area, which is perfect for when you’re laying out a base that should be filled. I’ll
include a couple of links in the show notes for some things to play with. Fermat Spirals are also
very pretty. They’re sort of a parabolic spiral. There’s also a great video that Leah gave for the
ACM SIGCHI conference that goes through all of this. And so I highly recommend watching the
video. It’s about maybe 14 minutes long. I read the Hackaday article, and I thought it did a good
job of explaining, you know, how you put the powder together with the clay and then fire it in the
kiln. But one of the things that caught my eye is they said that the shrinkage is consistent,
which has got to be awesome for metal parts, because then you’re getting, you know, the same
part every time. Yeah, that’s one of the, that’s, my wife does a bunch of clay stuff, and that’s
one of the things that you’re always having to figure out is clay always shrinks when you fire
it. But the amount of shrinkage really is based on the thickness of your piece, the tallness of the
piece, the amount of like wetness that day of the piece. And so like, you essentially have to like
make a couple of trial runs to get something of a consistent dimension. And so the fact that they can
get a very consistent output is huge. Oh, that’s interesting. I had no idea. So yeah, what’s your
number two for this week? Way back in episode four, in November of 2022, we talked about Matter,
the open source IoT specification that’s managed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, which is a
mouthful. If you don’t remember, don’t know of Matter, it requires a Matter controller, such as
a Google Nest device, Apple HomePod or Apple TV, or most Amazon Echo devices. And then for example,
you can buy a Matter supported smart light bulb and set it up with Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant
or Alexa without having to worry about what it’s compatible with. If it’s Matter compatible,
it’ll work with them all. I’ll link to a great article from Wired Magazine on what is Matter.
The reason I bring it up is Scott Shawcroft, CircuitPython’s lead developer, shared in a
recent Python on hardware newsletter update that he’s working on an open source implementation of
Matter called CircuitMatter. Don’t let the name fool you. It will be a pure Python implementation
of the Matter specification that will also be compatible with CircuitPython and potentially
even MicroPython. Jeff Epler has already implemented IPv6 networking support in CircuitPython,
which Matter needs as well. This leads me to believe, and this is just a guess,
is that Adafruit might make a Matter compatible microcontroller at some point in the future.
There’s already a board from SparkFun that is Matter compatible, but only with Arduino,
not with CircuitPython. I’ll link to that in the show notes as that came out this past January.
Now, if you read the article from Wired on Matter that I mentioned earlier, it does mention that
the functionality supported by Matter is mostly pretty basic for now, limited to on/off, start/stop,
and notifications from the device. But if you could program a microcontroller to even just do
a start/stop instead of always sending data via MQTT, for example, to take a measurement,
I could see a number of different use cases that pop into my mind for that.
It’s very, very early in development, but I think it’s something I’m excited to keep an eye on.
Yeah, the Matter stuff is really interesting. With the recent talk of Swift Embedded,
Swift’s the programming language that Apple uses for all their devices, what we should be using
when we write apps for the iPhone or whatever, they recently released a bunch of Matter examples
that run on the ESP32-C6 dev board, which I think there’s an ESP32-C6 Adafruit product as well.
These are just another version of the ESP32, it’s not like a special chip,
it’s not super expensive, it’s meant to be really low cost to go into smart light bulbs
and things like that. I can’t wait to see more hobbyist-level things that use Matter.
Yep, exactly. And it’ll probably have to be an S3 board because it needs
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so that S3 is probably the base minimum.
So that’s our show. I mentioned the special announcements. You want to tune in for a
special live episode of The Bootloader on CircuitPython Day, coming up on Friday, August 16th.
Thanks to Debra Ansell for taking time to share her experience at Teardown 2024,
and thank you for listening. For show notes, transcripts, and to join our newsletter,
visit thebootloader.net. Until next time, stay positive.
(chiming)