The pyboards Have Arrived!

Arlington Tech, the name we have informally given to the new school being planed for the current Arlington Career Center, will have a focus on STEM ("green STEM" in particular).  Our carpentry instructor has both experience with and a big interest in high school robotics, and since robotics is an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor, I'll be working with him next year to help students learn to program the robots.

When I heard about the programmable microprocessor that runs Python 3 called the pyboard at Pycon a last week, I was naturally interested in investigating it as a possible tool for our robotics effort.

I ordered two pyboards, which arrived today.  Here is a picture of one of them:

I searched up a quick tutorial on using it, and found Micro Python and pyboard - a Python running on a microcontroller scripts your electronics.

Here is a screen shot of one of the example scripts from this tutorial, which prints out value from the accelerometer on the board:

I have to stay focused on GIS programming and Firefox OS, but I have a friend interested in microprocessors who plans to explore this further.