Up by its own bootstraps 🎮

Ordinarily you write Thumby code on your computer, test in the emulator, then transfer over USB. After making a text editor and a shell, it occurred to me that I could now write an app from scratch on my Thumby itself.

There are only six buttons, so in the editor you have to type on a virtual keyboard in a very hunt-and-peck style. It's laborious. Thank the heavens for being able to duplicate lines to enter something similar.

Debugging is impossible. When the code crashes, the Thumby just re-starts. I had to stare at the code and guess why. Or rather, stare at a 10×5 window on the code. It took me ages to spot my Python syntax mistake.

Naturally it doesn't do much. Here is Hello World in Thumby MicroPython, written on the stupid thing itself.

import thumby
thumby.display.fill(0)
thumby.display.drawText('Hello world',3,12,1)
thumby.display.update()
while True:
    if thumby.buttonA.pressed():
        thumby.reset()

=> #Thumby | #programming

=> back to gemlog