Want to get new products info beamed straight into your inbox? New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter
We once had a Trinket M0 build fail because the firmware was eight bytes too big. A lot of our CircuitPython build optimization is handling all the error strings and their translations. That is the scale we work at now folks, and now we have a way to keep getting more bytes.
OpenAI released 722 math manuscripts, so we wanted to see whether any of that work could give us a little more room on a board. The company hasn’t disclosed that collection’s dollar cost. We do have some numbers from its earlier work.
One afternoon of agents: the OpenAI papers on one side, Adafruit’s own repos on the other.
Those output tokens would cost about $6.5 million at GPT-6 Astra’s current base rate of $50 per million output tokens. That’s a retail-price comparison though, and OpenAI used a different, unreleased model, and its internal costs likely differ. Inputs, training and other expenses are excluded. That comparison describes September’s effort; the October collection’s cost is still undisclosed. But does the math have any uses?
Good question! We found a connection with overlap packing. The equation is simple: STRAWBERRY + BERRYPIE = STRAWBERRYPIE. When possible, store shared bytes once. Across 51 GFX fonts, our packer saved 3,865 bytes, about 2.1% of bitmap data, with identical rendering. Ordinary greedy packing delivered those savings, soooo the new mathematical bound added nothing in our initial examples. Ah well – BUT WAIT!
The one OpenAI math idea we used: store shared bytes once.
The paper“A Polynomial-Time 2-Approximation for Shortest Common Superstring”, sent us looking in a useful direction, even though the savings came from an existing technique.
Mikey’s roundup covers 17 flash-related pull requests merged from September 10 through October 10, 2026:
Mikey Sklar: 3 merged PRs. Stronger ESP32-C5/C6 message compression and smaller printf and USB-name code on tiny boards. Sources: #11528, #11543, #11546.
Dan Halbert: 7 merged PRs. Storing qstr strings in one blob, smaller ulab operators, tighter translations, and SAMD code savings, with Dan directing, measuring and reviewing Claude’s work. Sources: #11369, #11373, #11403, #11404, #11407, #11410, #11537.
Vladimír Smitka: 7 merged PRs. Smaller mDNS and AES code, removing RP2040 time-zone code, recovering a Pico W linker gap, and trimming float helpers, fonts and property objects. Sources: #11365, #11371, #11379, #11533, #11534, #11535, #11536.
Who freed what, September 10 to October 10, 2026.
Reported savings, board by board
Chart research and original graphic by Mikey Sklar. Redrawn from the PR-reported figures for this article.
These bars add the before-and-after numbers reported in individual PRs. They are not a fresh build measuring the whole month’s combined gain. Revisions and configurations differ: the ESP32-C6 total combines TinyC6 and Feather C6 results, and the Trinket M0 total includes a 204-byte measurement from the related Feather M0 Basic. The ESP32-C5 bar uses the measured Russian-language firmware result, 2,928 bytes, rather than the 3,672-byte translation-generator estimate. Here, 1 KB means 1,000 bytes.
The hatched 4,096 bytes on Pico W are reclaimed linker capacity, not a smaller firmware image. These are space savings; some changes trade speed for size, including #11403‘s ulab operators. Open PRs #11527 (certificate bundle) and #11548 (UARTLogger II) are excluded as of October 10.
We thought the big wins were used up. Then Smitka found Daniel Engel’s hand-written Thumb-1 math routines, first proposed in 2018 and still unmerged. With Smitka’s float helpers already merged, our five-board report shows Engel’s routines freeing about 1.8 KB more per board. Tested float multiply/divide loops took 18% less time on Feather M0; one conversion got slower. We emailed Engel offering help getting it upstream.
Count the extra space once
Engel comparison adapted from Mikey Sklar’s original graphic, with the overlapping savings separated.
For Trinket M0, the report gives 2,972 bytes saved by Engel’s routines. The shared helpers in #11536 had already saved 1,172 bytes. Replacing them gives an additional 1,800 bytes by comparison, rather than adding another 2,972 on top. This compares reported measurements with different baselines; it is not a new combined-build measurement.
We went off looking in some AI mathematics data dumps, and ended up helping get a human’s eight-year-old assembly code into use. I’ll take it.
Think of this like CERN’s particle collider… an enormous instrument for discovering how the universe works, with findings shared beyond the laboratory. Mathematics are in undiscovered territory, we don’t make it, we discover it. These systems help explore it, once the results are checked and shared, people far from the original project can use them.
Credit the discovery (who cares who found it, it was always there)…how to do more is where it’s at. Then let’s compete over who makes it useful to the most people. Pair mathematicians with engineers on the front like of bytes squeezing or whatever. Share the paper, the code, the failed experiment.
And if some of that work helps the firmware fit, we’ll use it to make CircuitPython better and better.
The idea of an exoskeleton, a worn mechanical device that augments human ability, isn’t new. Patents dating back to the 1800’s demonstrate concerted effort to meld man and machine. Sci-fi is littered with them, but until recently, they were mostly the stuff of imagination. Slowly, real, practical exoskeletons have been called into use in manufacturing, warehouses, search and rescue, and even the battlefield. Are we entering the age of the exoskeleton? Ildar Farkhatdinov writing for the conversation thinks so:
Devices like these are called human exoskeletons. They attach to parts of the body to create an external – or “exo” – mechanical structure. This powered frame enhances the wearer’s physical capabilities.
In physically demanding fields, workers are increasingly using these devices during strenuous tasks. IKEA has used SuitX exoskeletons for several years now. These assist warehouse workers with handling heavy materials. Ford, Boeing and Mazda Toyota have also all adopted the tech on some of their assembly lines.
Do you ever feel like someone or something is watching you? In the case of this project, it is! You can use a Fruit Jam running CircuitPython with a USB webcam to display monster eyes that gaze in the direction of motion captured by the webcam. The CircuitPython code utilizes Turbo helper modules to speed up tasks like drawing the monster eyes and checking for new motion in the camera frames.
If you missed this week’s livestream of John Park’s Product Pick of the Week, not to worry, here’s the video. This week’s pick is the DC Motor + Stepper FeatherWing! Watch the video to find out about the DC Motor + Stepper FeatherWing, how to use it, a live demo, and more.
Three different spooky tombstone tea-light holders, with an alternative version available without crosses. Accommodates round tea lights up to 40mm diameter. Two-piece construction with fuzzy skin texture. Stones print at 45° angle for optimal surface quality. Base plates use 150% flowrate with Hilbert curve pattern for the fuzzy top layer; lower stone portions must print without fuzzy skin for proper assembly fit. Pre-configured profiles with custom fuzzy skin settings and manual supports provided. Commercial license available via Patreon. By Maxx Design
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent out once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up NOW for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter
