#cat-hardware

This week at the Monday sprint of the 10th PyCon AU in Sydney I "built" my first microcontroller "thing".

Well, thanks to Matt Trentini I was able to play with an ESP8266 on a Wemos D1 board) This tiny board can run a complete Python implementation!!!

And MicroPython was already "flashed" onto the device, so first thing was of course to get a REPL going. But when plugged in to my MacBook the ESP8266 didn't show up a serial tty. I needed to find the right driver (board specific). Once the driver was installed on my laptop I was "in".

The next challenge was to get the on-board LED lighting up. - That was easy: Everything worked the way the ESP8266 tutorial on the MicroPython site described.

And then I dove a little bit deeper in the boot-up process of MicroPython. I wrote a script (and flashed it onto the board), which made the board, when plugged into power, blink a few times then stop. Yeay!

Later I played a bit with some NeoPixel LEDs (on a so called "RGB Shield") connected to the board and I realised there's a lot more which can be done!

I'm curious how the new flag ship iPhone in handling size compares to the other models. - So here a table listing relevant iPhone models in order of physical dimensions:

1

We can clearly see that the new iPhone X is noticeably bigger than iPhone 7 and 8, but smaller than the Plus models - it lays somewhat in between.

So we have it again: When an iPhone model with a completely new form factor comes out - like the switch from model 5 to 6 -, then the "default" size of the phones increase.

So the times where people wearing normal men's trousers could put their mobile unobtrusively in a trouser pocket are definitely gone...

I got a Epson R3000 to make real prints of my photos. It can print up to A3+, that's pretty big: 329mm x 483 mm! Today I did my first print of that size:

Just for the record here 2 photos when I unpacked the printer: