Adafruit released CirtcuitPython 8 final today ( https://circuitpython.org ). I’ve already installed it on my Pico W boards and a Pro S3 ( https://esp32s3.com/pros3.html ) I’ve had for a while now. I like the Pro S3 because it’s built with the ESP32-S3 with 8 MB PSRAM and 16 MB FLASH.

I’m still hoping that the upstream MicroPython will begin a final release in the very near future. I need both versions due to the types of microcontrollers I’m working with as well as the types of workloads in each version.

The last time I built MicroPython from the GitHub repository and then flashed an ESP-32 (ESP32-S3-DevKitC-N8R8) was right before Christmas last year. Then I had to heavily add to one of MicroPython’s board targets with configuration switches that turned on 8MB octal addressing. This time, after running git fetch then git pull, I didn’t have to modify anything. Instead, there’s a new board target, GENERIC_S3_SPIRAM_OCT, which means all you have to do is change directory into ports/esp32 and run:

1. make BOARD=GENERIC_S3_SPIRAM_OCT clean
2. make BOARD=GENERIC_S3_SPIRAM_OCT submodules
3. make BOARD=GENERIC_S3_SPIRAM_OCT

And before you do that, you might want to go up two levels into mpy-cross and run make clean then make.

I went looking into the boards subdirectory and discovered that the GENERIC_S3_SPIRAM_OCT subdirectory had a timestamp of 21 January 2023. The addition of full octal addressing support in the main branch is very welcome, as octal support has been missing for as far back as I have been working with MicroPython sources. I also notice that I now have the full 8 MB available to MicroPython. My build from December had half of that, which I attributed at the time to having it split half-and-half between the two Tensilica cores. I could certainly have been wrong in that assumption. Whatever the reason, I now have the entire amount available to MicroPython.

I hope that this feature addition means that the MicroPython developers are very near a new official release, which I assume would be 1.20. In 2022 there were two releases, 1.18 in January and 1.19.1 in June. I’d hoped a new release might have come this January, but we’re already into February and nothing new has come out. They’re still developing and checking in new changes.

Links

enabling 8 mb psram within micropython 1.19.1 on an esp32-s3 development board