Category: Embedded

micropython 1.22 is released

whbeebe
View of WiFi page on iPhone 11 Pro Max

The MicroPython organization released version 1.22 on 27 December 2023. I missed it until today because it was Christmas time and I was, believe it or not, taking time off from some of the nerdier aspects of software development. But I downloaded it today and installed it and for once in a very long time it worked straight “out of the box.” I didn’t have to download source and build an image myself. What’s more the binary I downloaded for this board has been built to support octal addressed PSRAM, something that’s been missing completely since version 1.19.

So far everything seems to work, especially my stand-along WiFi access point (see above) written entirely in MicroPython. I obviously have a lot to do investigating it, and I will given enough time. By the way, the full version shows that this release was build with Espressif’s ESP-IDF versoin 5.0.4. Espressif has released a 5.0.5, but I can attest that MicroPython will not build with 5.0.5. So if you want or need to build from MicroPython source then make sure you have the proper toolchain installed.

For the curious this is running on an ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1 N8R8 (8 MiB non-volatile flash, 8 MiB PSRAM).

Links

MicroPython Download — https://micropython.org/download/ESP32_GENERIC_S3/

espressif esp-idf version 5.1 released

whbeebe

This is an example of MicroPython head (i.e. the latest source of MicroPython beyond version 1.20 pulled from MicroPython’s Github repo at https://github.com/micropython/micropython ) built with Espressif’s latest official ESP-IDF V5.1 release. This latest ESP-IDF release landed today, 30 June 2023 via their Github repo ( https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf ). The last line shows the version of MicroPython followed by the version of the ESP-IDF that was used (IDFv5.1) to build it, and this time the very latest version of newlib.

Of equal interest to me is how the maximum amount of reported RAM (second line from the bottom) has halved again, from 8MB to 4MB. I don’t know if this is a feature of the next version of MicroPython, or if it will go back to reporting the full 8MB of the device (an ESP32-S3-DevKitC-N8R8 development board in this case), or if this is the amount of RAM available to the MicroPython instance.

I’ve also noticed that ESP-IDF v5.1 official and ESP-IDF main (which is currently v5.2-dev) are using the same compiler tool chain. Regardless, the big news (for me) is that everything I can compile to run on any ESP32 device now uses the same tool chain throughout. For a time I had to keep an ESP-IDF v4.4.5 tool chain in order to compile just MicroPython. And the official MicroPython 1.20 does require ESP-IDF v4.4.4. But the latest checkins to MicroPython shows that the MicroPython developers for ESP32 have moved up to a fully up-to-date officially released ESP-IDF v5.1.