This week, I’m joined by Kattni Rembor, a creative engineer at Adafruit Industries. Kattni’s role is varied, as she covers embedded software, hardware design, technical writing, and community leadership.
In this interview, we talk about her work developing CircuitPython and the role mentorship has played in her career to date. She also shares her advice for anyone looking to start their first hardware project using CircuitPython.
Ricky: Welcome to Real Python, Kattni. I’m so happy that you could join me for this interview. Let’s start in the same manner we do with all our guests, with the inevitable question: How’d you get into programming, and when did you start using Python?
Kattni: Those two questions are one and the same for me. I started with programming in July 2017, and I started with Python. I was unemployed and had a lot of time on my hands.
I decided to try to learn Python. I looked around and figured the official tutorial was the best place to start. It turns out that it’s written for programmers, not beginners. I got to section four, hit a wall, and gave up.
The hardware side of things began with a sale on Raspberry Pi Zero Ws and a friend of mine giving me one. I immediately did the thing you always do after getting a Raspberry Pi, and that is to buy all the things to go with your Raspberry Pi.
I found an accessory called Sense HAT that had a bunch of sensors and LEDs built into it, but it wasn’t designed for the Raspberry Pi Zero W, so I tried to recreate it with individual sensors, which got expensive quickly.
I discovered something called Circuit Playground Express that also had a lot of sensors and LEDs built into it and figured that would work. I ordered one, having no idea that it wasn’t compatible with the Raspberry Pi. It turns out it was a microcontroller.
I got it home and took one look at it, decided it was entirely too complicated, and put it aside for two weeks before finally picking it up and plugging it in. I remember thinking, I will never write anything as cool as this demo. It was a rainbow swirl on the LEDs that played a tone for each LED that lit up.
I looked into what I could do with the Circuit Playground Express. There were three options. Arduino went right over my head, and I had no desire whatsoever to try to learn it. MakeCode was just simple enough to be frustrating. I found a single mention of something called CircuitPython and thought, Hey, I’m trying to learn Python—this is perfect!
I found an Adafruit video on getting started, got it installed, and within a very short period of time, I had a blinking LED. As simple as it sounds, nothing I had done with Python up to that point hooked me as much as that moment. For the first time since attempting to learn Python, I felt a connection to what I was doing. I had found my passion.
Ricky: Adafruit’s microcontrollers are famously embedded with CircuitPython. For those who aren’t familiar with CircuitPython, how is this different from other microcontrollers? And how has this impacted the way you instruct in workshops and with Adafruit’s Learn tutorials?
Kattni: The difference depends on which microcontrollers you’re referring to. Arduino is basically C++, often uses an IDE, and requires being compiled before you can load it onto a board. MicroPython, while a version of Python, requires complicated extra steps to get going.
Read the full article at https://realpython.com/interview-kattni-rembor/ »
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