The Benchmark-pocalypse

There’s been a lot of talk about the vuln-pocalypse, to which Dan Luu doesn’t have much to add because Dan isn’t not a security person. But there hasn’t been much discussion on the closely related (and to be fair, less serious, issue), the benchmark-pocalypse.

While it’s become easier than ever to make serious performance gains, it’s also become easier than ever to reward hack a benchmark and make fake performance gains. The former is probably happening quietly across many different companies, but the latter is something I see at least once a week nowadays. Someone will claim they optimized X and got some huge performance improvement over existing software, but, when you look at it, what they did was make some optimization that improves benchmark performance without actually improving real-world performance. This is often some kind of “we rewrote X in Rust” project or a new startup that’s looking to either fundraise or sell something, but it happens on other kinds of projects as well.

Of course, people have always trumpeted unrepresentative microbenchmarks to show that their pet project is great. It’s always been easy to fake up an unrepresentative microbenchmark and that’s never going to change. What’s changed is that it used to take a lot of work to game a large benchmark suite, but an LLM and loop can just do it. There are quite a few famous examples of gaming large benchmark suites from back when this was hard. For example, way back when people cared about SPECint / SPECfp as proxies for workstation performance, CPU vendors would try to find compiler “optimizations” that would speed up the calculation in the benchmark, such as Sun finding a way to improve 179.art by 12x in SPECfp2000. Skilled engineers spent a lot of time trying to find benchmark hacks like that. LLMs not only make this trivial, they do it by default, making formerly trustworthy benchmarks meaningless unless you audit the result or trust someone who did.

Rather than point to someone’s bad claim, I’ll point to FRE, this regex engine I had an agent build, which I could claim is the world’s fastest regex engine because it beats the Rust regex crate at the fairly comprehensive rebar regex benchmark suite. But this was created by putting an agent in a loop for a month with instructions to not overfit to the benchmark but no real supervision. For the most part, getting an LLM to give you a good benchmark score is fairly easy, and this case was no different; it took a couple weeks to roughly match Rust regex crate performance and then another couple weeks to get to 1.4x faster on rebar. But agents are wont to reward hack and overfit unless you put serious guardrails in place to avoid that, which I didn’t do in this case as an experiment.

See more on danluu.com. Via Hacker News.

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Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix

A new paper in the Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities entitled Data Center Waste Heat as an Emerging Urban Thermal Hazard: First Field Measurements of Neighborhood-Scale Air Temperature Impacts by David J. Sailor, Soroush Samareh Abolhassani, Eli P. Martin:

Data centers are among the fastest-growing sources of concentrated anthropogenic heat in urban environments. Despite heat flux densities that exceed peak solar irradiance by a factor of 2–6, their thermal impacts on adjacent communities have never been directly measured or reported in the peer-reviewed literature. This short communication addresses that gap by presenting the first vehicle-based traverse measurements of air temperature in residential neighborhoods downwind of operational data centers.

This communication presents the first field evidence that operational data centers produce measurable warming in adjacent residential neighborhoods, with the downwind warming effect as large as 2.2 °C and average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than upwind temperatures, extending more than 250 m downwind. These impacts arise from heat flux densities of 2000–6000 W/m², magnitudes 2–6 times peak solar irradiance, equivalent to the heat emitted by thousands of residential buildings concentrated on a single site.

See the full paper (not currently locked by publisher) here.

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3D Printed Gary the Snail Inspired Speaker and Phone Charger

I’m ready! I’m ready! To 3D PRINT! momandeum created this delightfully fun Gary the Snail inspired housing for an existing phone charger and speaker situation and shared a vide of the process on YouTube

While we don’t have any SpongeBob builds in the Adafruit Learning System, the Ruiz Brothers and Liz Clark did make this Severence inspired bluetooth speaker with an ESP32 Feather.

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ICYMI: Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: openbricks your ESP32 robot, CircuitPython Day, Python Guitar Pedal and More!

If you missed this week’s Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter, here is the ICYMI (in case you missed it) version.

To never miss another issue, subscribe now! – You’ll get a terrific newsletter each Monday (which is out before this post). 12,382 subscribers worldwide!

The next newsletter goes out Monday morning and subscribing is the best way to keep up with all things Python for hardware. No ads or spam, no selling lists, leave any time.

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From the Editor:

Welcome to the latest Python on Microcontrollers newsletter! This week the Coldcard controversy is winding down while the celebrations for CircuitPython Day on August 21st (THIS FRIDAY!) are red hot with a couple of project sneak peeks included in this issue. MicroPython use is going strong with openbricks’ ability to program ESP32 robots. And someone made MicroPython installable using pip. If you’re looking to install Python on Windows, there is a new and easy guide for that also.

I really like this week’s featured project. I couldn’t tell a crow’s call from a blackbird, but now I don’t have to. Just set the microphone for this project near a bird feeder and it makes a lovely chart of the birds it hears. Magic! And I’ve uncovered other projects from around the world for your review. I sincerely hope you enjoy this issue. – Anne Barela, Editor

We’re on Discord, Twitter/X, BlueSky and for past newsletters – view them all here. If you’re reading this on the web, please subscribe here. Here’s the news this week:

openbricks – Pybricks-style MicroPython Robot Firmware for ESP32

openbricks is an open-source (MIT) MicroPython firmware for ESP32-S3 that brings a Pybricks-style Python robotics API to commodity hardware: $15 serial-bus servos, a SPI IMU, reflectance arrays. The motor hot path runs at 1 kHz in native C inside the firmware: drivebase controller, trajectory planner, and gyro heading correction read inside the control tick. Programs cross-compile on the host with mpy-cross and upload over BLE, and a MuJoCo-based simulator runs the same firmware API unchanged for hardware-free development – openbricks.dev, documentation and GitHub.

CircuitPython Day Is On Friday August 21, 2026

It’s that time of year! Adafruit has determined that August 21, 2026 is the snakiest day of the year and designated it CircuitPython Day! Adafruit will have special shows and more throughout the day. Tag your projects #CircuitPythonDay2026 on social media and Adafruit will look to highlight them.

Check out the post for the latest schedule which changes as more content is added – Adafruit Blog.

Ubuntu Budgie 24.04.4 LTS for Raspberry Pi

There’s a new Ubuntu Budgie port for Raspberry Pi computers featuring the modern Budgie desktop environment. It’s based on the Ubuntu Budgie 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) release. The new Ubuntu Budgie port for Raspberry Pi is built using Ubuntu’s official image tool – 9to5linux.

MicroPython Can Be Installed Via pip

Gadgetoid on BlueSky notes “someone has made MicroPython installable via pip. Mad, genius or mad genius? It’s kinda brilliant” – BlueSky.

A CircuitPython-Based Guitar Pedal

Cooper, aka ReLiC-se, has whipped together a demo of a good handful of the audio effects available on CircuitPython playing live directly through his prototype DSP guitar pedal – BlueSky and YouTube.

10,501 Radios in Seven Days: What a $69 Badge Heard at Summer Camp

Jerry Gamblin wanted to build a little screen on a bag that shows what networks are nearby and what they are. The thing that finally made it possible was the Pimoroni Tufty 2350 showing up at Adafruit: an RP2350B, a 2.8″ colour screen, 2.4 GHz WiFi and Bluetooth, a 1000 mAh battery in the box, and MicroPython already flashed on it – JerryGamblin.com.

“Seven days of Summer Camp produced 4,653 access points and 5,848 Bluetooth devices, all of it passive.”

The Best New Features in Python 3.15

Highlights of Python 3.15 include lazy imports, faster JIT compilation, better error messages, and smarter profiling. A release candidate is now available – InfoWorld.

Just released: Raspberry Pi Book of Making 2027

The Book of Making 2027 is coming soon (18 August 2026) from Raspberry Pi Press. There are so many projects in the book including a robot that you build from scratch, long-range radio communications, a CO2 monitor, a drum machine, 3D-printed moulds for soap… the list goes on and on – Raspberry Pi News.

Five Easy Ways to Install Python on Windows

Learn how to install Python on Windows using the Python Install Manager, WinGet, uv, Miniconda, or the official Python installer, and choose the best setup for beginners and Python development – KDnuggets.

This Week’s Python Streams

Python on Hardware is all about building a cooperative ecosphere which allows contributions to be valued and to grow knowledge. Below are the streams within the last week focusing on the community.

CircuitPython Deep Dive Stream

Last Friday, Scott streamed work on BLE workflow on Zephyr.

You can see the latest video and past videos on the Adafruit YouTube channel under the Deep Dive playlist – YouTube.

CircuitPython Parsec

John Park’s CircuitPython Parsec this week is on Fruit Jam Library: NeoPixels – Adafruit Blog and YouTube.

Catch all the episodes in the YouTube playlist.

Deep Dive with Tim

Last week, Tim streamed work on USB Audio stereo support.

You can see the latest video and past videos on the Adafruit YouTube channel under the Deep Dive playlist – YouTube.

CircuitPython Weekly Meeting

CircuitPython Weekly Meeting for August 10th, 2026 (notes) on YouTube.

Project of the Week: Track Bird Visitors With A Raspberry Pi

BirdNET uses deep learning to identify more than 11,000 species worldwide from sound. It reports on a web interface of its own making, but what really takes things to a new level is an optional, stylish E-Ink panel that shows the last 24 hours’ worth of visitors at a glance in a collage – BirdNET and GitHub. Via Hackaday.

Popular Last Week

What was the most popular, most clicked link, in last week’s newsletter? The Raspberry Pi’s 15-year reign is quietly ending—here’s why.

Did you know you can read past issues of this newsletter in the Adafruit Daily Archive? Check it out.

Notes from Adafruit Playground

Adafruit Playground is a place for the community to post their projects and other making tips/tricks/techniques. Ad-free, it’s an easy way to publish your work in a safe space for free.

Electronic Cowbell – Adafruit Playground.

Step Motor Library for Raspberry Pi – Adafruit Playground.

News From Around the Web

Maker Eugene Lubliner has released a Python-based project to turn a Raspberry Pi single-board computer with attached display into a Star Trek-inspired LCARS user interface — displaying statistics from and allowing control of a Pi-hole ad-blocking server – hackster.io. Via BlueSky.

The free Raspberry Pi Pico Pinout website now allows for user defined pin names which is handy for project use – pico.pinout.xyz.

Cerberus: an obstacle avoiding robot with Mecanum wheels. It is powered by an Adafruit Feather RP2040 running CircuitPython – Instructables.

Buying a Raspberry Pi in 2026? You’d better have a very good reason – How-To Geek.

A Mac Status Display using a Pimoroni Presto and MicroPython. A 480×480 hardware system monitor for macOS. A small agent on the Mac samples CPU, GPU, memory, disk and network and sends them to a Pimoroni Presto over USB; the board draws an AIDA64-style panel with radial gauges, bar meters, per-core activity and per-interface network traffic – GitHub.

Praveen Kumar Verma writes “What if your ESP32 had its own virtual pet?” OpenGotchi is an open-source handheld built around an ESP32-S3. It has a 1.8” AMOLED display, physical buttons, WiFi and gotchiOS. But it’s more than a cute gadget. The device has its own apps, supports MicroPython, and can connect to the internet using MQTT. Tiny hardware, but a surprisingly complete embedded system – X.

Brent Rubell gives a sneak peek of a marquee which supports any e-paper display panel, color modes, and any hardware that can fetch raw data from adafruit.io. He’ll show off the CircuitPython version during a stream on CircuitPython Day – BlueSky.

Trying out the M5Stack using MicroPython – itoi.jp. Via BlueSky. (Japanese)

PulseLink Remote Display: M5Stack Tab5 Dashboard: Give PulseLink a touch-driven M5Stack Tab5 dashboard with live waveform, BPM, IBI, sensor guidance, spectrum, and packet diagnostics using MicroPython – hackster.io.

A curiously minty Raspberry Pi Zero cyberdeck – Raspberry Pi News and YouTube.

A DIY-made “Automatic Water Cannon” to protect crops from animals. It integrates an electric water gun (ICE BURST) using Raspberry Pi Pico 2W + motion sensor + relay. When motion is detected, it automatically shoots for 2 seconds. Programmed in MicroPython – X (Japanese).

Schrödinger’s Toilet: Are You in There or Not? To avoid awkward knocking or opening, otojun built an M5Stamp-S3/ToF sensor system that turns the toilet door window red when occupied using MicroPython – hackster.io.

Ever catch yourself mindlessly scrolling on your phone? Have you ever had your screen time exceed the amount of sleep you get? Well, if that sounds like you (or it sounds like someone you know…), build a Doomscroller-Preventor that uses a webcam and a custom AI model to detect when someone is holding a phone, using a Raspberry Pi RP2040 and MicroPython – Instructables.

Sinclair GamerCard review: the novel Raspberry Pi handheld is much more than a ZX Spectrum nostalgia trip – Creative Bloq. Via BlueSky.

Troubleshooting video delay on the Raspberry Pi – Hackaday.

A new MicroPython for micro:bit beginners guide – YouTube.

New

WCH CH32V407 and CH32V467 are new 200 MHz RISC-V microcontrollers with a built-in 10/100 Mbps Ethernet MAC + PHY, a USB 2.0 high-speed (480 Mbps) host PHY, up to 8 MB on-chip PSRAM, and a range of peripherals for industrial IoT & edge AI applications – CNX and hackster.io.

RAKwireless has just launched the WisGate Connect Router RAK7392 (not to be confused with the older WisGate Connect RAK7391), an industrial-grade edge router and gateway built around Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4/5 (CM4/CM5). The system features three Gigabit Ethernet ports, one 2.5GbE port, wireless expansion via a mini PCIe slot, and WisBlock connectors for sensors and I/O modules – CNX.

New Boards Supported by CircuitPython

The number of supported microcontrollers and Single Board Computers (SBC) grows every week. This section outlines which boards have been included in CircuitPython or added to CircuitPython.org.

This week there was one new board added:

• ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1-N32R16 by Espressif

Note: For non-Adafruit boards, please use the support forums of the board manufacturer for assistance, as Adafruit does not have the hardware to assist in troubleshooting.

Looking to add a new board to CircuitPython? It’s highly encouraged! Adafruit has four guides to help you do so:

• How to Add a New Board to CircuitPython
• How to add a New Board to the circuitpython.org website
• Adding a Single Board Computer to PlatformDetect for Blinka
• Adding a Single Board Computer to Blinka

New Adafruit Learning System Guides

The Adafruit Learning System has over 3,200 free guides for learning skills and building projects including using Python.

Motion-Reactive LED Devil Horns from Erin St Blaine

CircuitPython Libraries

The CircuitPython library numbers are continually increasing, while existing ones continue to be updated. Here we provide library numbers and updates!

To get the latest Adafruit libraries, download the Adafruit CircuitPython Library Bundle. To get the latest community contributed libraries, download the CircuitPython Community Bundle.

If you’d like to contribute to the CircuitPython project on the Python side of things, the libraries are a great place to start. Check out the CircuitPython.org Contributing page. If you’re interested in reviewing, check out Open Pull Requests. If you’d like to contribute code or documentation, check out Open Issues. We have a guide on contributing to CircuitPython with Git and GitHub, and you can find us in the #help-with-circuitpython and #circuitpython-dev channels on the Adafruit Discord.

You can check out this list of all the Adafruit CircuitPython libraries and drivers available.

The current number of CircuitPython libraries is 576!

New Libraries

There are no new CircuitPython libraries this week.

Updated Libraries

There are no updated CircuitPython libraries this week.

What’s the CircuitPython team up to this week?

What is the team up to this week? Let’s check in:

Dan

I spent more time on fixing the CircuitPython BLE workflow last week. After a lot of testing, mostly done by test scripts written by an LLM, I determined that the problem was with the particular BLE adapter on my desktop computer. I replaced it with a better-supported adapter and the base problem went away. There is still an issue that Linux does not provide a pairing agent automatically, but we can document workarounds for that.

Tim

I have continued work related to audio this week. I did some more testing on the USB audio stereo support and found a bug in synthio.Note panning. A fix for that was submitted and I tested it. I have also been working on a CircuitPython board def and some core modules to support another Teenage Engineering device. This one has an nRF52840 main chip, along with an I2S audio codec, and 4Gb EMMC storage. I’ve made good progress, the device is booting successfully under CircuitPython and I have functional audio PoC code. My next goal is getting the EMMC working to be able to copy songs to the device and eventually play them back.

Scott

At the end of last week I started working on Zephyr BLE pairing and bonding which leads to secure connections. BLE GATT support for Zephyr was also merged. I’m looking forward to getting the BLE workflow going with Zephyr.

Upcoming Events

The next MicroPython Meetup in Melbourne will be on August 26 – Luma. You can see recordings of previous meetings on YouTube.

PyCon AU 2026 will be 26 Aug. 2026 – 30 Aug. 2026 in Brisbane, Australia.

Other Events This Year

• PyCon JP 2026 is August 21-22 at the International Conference Center Hiroshima with sprints the 23rd at Hiroshima University Higashi-Senda Campus.
• Maker Faire Bay Area is September 26-28 at Mare Island, California.
• PyConZA 2026, South Africa’s Python conference, will be 14–18 Oct at Belmont Square, Cape Town, South Africa.
• Espressif DevCon 2026 will be November 3-4 in Milan, Italy and online.

If you know of virtual events or upcoming events, please let us know via email to cpnews(at)adafruit(dot)com.

Latest Releases

CircuitPython’s stable release is 10.2.1 and its unstable release is 10.3.0-alpha.4. New to CircuitPython? Start with our Welcome to CircuitPython Guide.

20260803 is the latest Adafruit CircuitPython library bundle.

20260806 is the latest CircuitPython Community library bundle.

v1.28.0 is the latest MicroPython release. Documentation for it is here.

3.14.7 is the latest Python release. The latest pre-release version is 3.15.0rc1.

4,541 Stars Like CircuitPython? Star it on GitHub!

Call for Help – Translating CircuitPython is now easier than ever

One important feature of CircuitPython is translated control and error messages. With the help of fellow open source project Weblate, we’re making it even easier to add or improve translations.

Sign in with an existing account such as GitHub, Google or Facebook and start contributing through a simple web interface. No forks or pull requests needed! As always, if you run into trouble join us on Discord, we’re here to help.

38,907 Thanks

The Adafruit Discord community, where we do all our CircuitPython development in the open, reached 38,907 humans – thank you! Adafruit believes Discord offers a unique way for Python on hardware folks to connect. Join today at https://adafru.it/discord.

ICYMI – In case you missed it

Python on hardware is the Adafruit Python video-newsletter-podcast! The news comes from the Python community, Discord, Adafruit communities and more and is broadcast on ASK an ENGINEER Wednesdays. The complete Python on Hardware weekly videocast playlist is here. The video podcast is on iTunes, YouTube, Instagram, and XML.

The weekly community chat on Adafruit Discord server CircuitPython channel – Audio / Podcast edition – Audio from the Discord chat space for CircuitPython, meetings are usually Mondays at 2pm ET, this is the audio version on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and XML feed.

Contribute

The CircuitPython Weekly Newsletter is a CircuitPython community-run newsletter emailed every Monday. To contribute your content, please email your news to cpnews (at) adafruit (dot) com with information and link(s) to your content.

Join the Adafruit Discord or post to the forum if you have questions.

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Miss Twisted’s Mermaid Ballgown Fin Prop

Miss Twisted made this incredible fin prop for their mermaid ballgown.

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If you’re working on your own mermaid costume and looking to add more props, check out these guides from Erin St. Blaine in the Adafruit Learn System.

Glowing Scale Armor

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Light-Up Costumes in Harsh Environments

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Ursula’s Seashell Necklace

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AGI-64 Brings Sierra Adventures to the Commodore 64

Space Quest running on a Commodore 64 from Mean Hamster

 

Finally, after decades of waiting, you’ll be able to play Sierra On-Line’s classic adventure games on the Commodore 64. Developed for Sierra’s King’s Quest in 1984, Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) was the game engine behind classic adventure games like Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest and more. AGI was available on many of the contemporary platforms (MS-DOs, Apple pple IIc/IIe, etc) but was never ported to the Commodore 64, until now.

Through the work of Mean Hamster Software’s AGI-64 you’ll soon be able to play these classic Sierra Adventures on original and emulated Commodore 64s

We are happy to announce AGI-64, a long-awaited AGI interpreter for the Commodore 64. It is currently around 75% complete for Space Quest 1, which is completely playable now, and the engine aims to support most AGI games of the era.

The interpreter is in testing and already supports most standard AGI operations.
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AGI-64 will be a free download when it is ready. It includes a tool that takes the .vol and .obj files you supply from your own library and compiles them into a 1 MB EasyFlash-compatible CRT file

Learn more!

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SideQuestCrafting Made Mira’s Gok-Do!

No visit with my 4 year old niece is complete without her explaining KPop Demon Hunters to her sister, 1, and cousin, 1 1/2. And she’s totally right to try to get the little ones on board – Rumi, Mira, and Zoe and awesome. Check out SideQuestCrafting’s take on Mira’s Gok-Do on YouTube

Did you know the Ruiz Brothers made Rumi’s Sword with nOOds? Follow along with their guide in the Adafruit Learning System!

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