Testing the stack with CircuitPython

Like I stated earlier, one of the reasons why I’ve now been so much about improving my stack is the fact that I backed Meadow F7 a while back. I kinda want to maximize my productivity with it, so I’ve been doing what I can beforehand (and while the mood lasts).

I already talked how this work included setting up Grafana and other data collection facilitations. I also ‘teased’ about using NATS for registering some long-running ad-hoc jobs. I’ve been calling the NATS-based thing Sumu. More about it later. But anyway, now these were put to a somewhat unexpected test when I ordered bunch of preparatory stuff from Adafruit and got a Circuit Playground Express as a freebie.

I’m trying to keep this post short, so I’ll just state that it can’t really be any simpler to get some samples running with it. Basic documentation is very thorough and there’s a bunch of sample code available, and with a bunch of sensors included in the board itself. As kind of an embedded Hello World I moved to the embedded temperature sensor after blinking a led and playing some drum samples.

The code on the device reads the temperature once a second, and prints the averaged value every 10 seconds over the serial console. On PC I have a LinqPad script registering itself to Sumu (with a health check), reading the serial console, and pushing data to Postgres while also serving the current (or next) temperature value via Sumu to browsers (via Node-Red). There’s even error handling and retrying in case the serial console gets disconnected for some reason (for example the device is unplugged). All this in 180 lines (with majority of it being serial console stuff :p) and maybe an hour or two! Feeling good about things!

Let’s just hope that this is just the beginning, and not the peak :s