Micropython

Claude can write MicroPython just fine. The annoying part is everything after that, getting the code onto a board, connecting to the REPL, figuring out why the pin numbers are wrong, iterating. I wanted Claude to be able to do all of that itself, talk directly to the hardware while I watch. ViperIDE is a browser-based IDE for MicroPython and CircuitPython by Volodymyr Shymanskyy. It connects to devices over USB, Bluetooth, or WiFi and gives you a file manager, editor, and REPL terminal. If you haven’t tried MicroPython before it’s one of the easier ways to get started. ...

MicroPython has about 1500 open issues across its repos. Some of them have been there for years. A bunch are duplicates of each other, a bunch more are already fixed by PRs that got merged without anyone linking them back, and a pretty solid chunk are just noise (support questions, cross-posts, wrong-repo stuff). Nobody’s going to sit down and manually review 1500 issues against 8000+ PRs looking for connections though. ...

A colleague had just reached a critical milestone, getting a stable LVGL-based UI running on our product’s 5" MIPI display. It was a significant piece of driver work: MicroPython application code on an NXP i.MX RT1176 (Cortex-M7 @ 1 GHz), driving LVGL v9 on a 720x1280 MIPI DSI touchscreen. An embedded system, not a phone or PC. The UI worked, but the on-screen keyboard was unusable. Each keypress took nearly 200ms to render, dropping to 1-2 FPS while typing, missing many keypresses entirely. For context, touchscreen input generally needs 30+ FPS (under 33ms per frame) to feel responsive, and 60+ FPS to feel smooth. We were at 5 FPS on a good frame. That performance is unusable for a client demo, let alone a shipping product, and without any obvious cause for the lag it wasn’t clear if we had a fundamental hardware/design failure or a fixable configuration issue. ...