Version 1.19.4

Frustrating Fix Frenzy

Finally! A release on a Friday. Things are slowly falling back into place.

⚠️ The Pico W firmware is still building against an unstable release of MicroPython, since there is no stable release yet. There will be bugs. We are currently monitoring the status of an issue with Pico W crashing when connected to USB on macOSX - see: micropython/micropython#8904

This release includes some bug fixes, a change to how our CI fetches compilers and some new bits and bobs.

• Dramatically reduced the C++ stack/heap usage of VL53L5CX, switching it over to using MicroPython's gc_heap instead. This should get it working on Pico W boards!
• Fixed Pico Scroll and Pico Unicorn, which were hogging too much memory up front, to work with Pico W!
• Added a ShiftRegister class to pimoroni for reading the buttons on Inky Frame
• Reduced the SDCard IO speed (for C++ users) so that reads aren't a corrupted mess

Continuous Integration Irritation

A slightly technical explanation for future adventurers and those playing along at home.

Our CI builds were coming out a little wonky. This transpired to be an issue with how it was fetching compilers (wget the ARM GCC .zip directly) in order to speed things up. We have reverted this change- after much frustrated tinkering.

If you decide to build MicroPython locally, you can check for a borked build by running:

arm-none-eabi-nm --demangle=gnu-v3 --print-size --size-sort firmware.elf

And keeping an eye out for rogue exception handling symbols such as: d_print_comp_inner. These indicate - afaik - that -fno-rtti (no runtime introspection) and --fno-exception (no runtime exception handling) are not having the desired effect. The resulting, bloated build usually fails spectacularly (doesn't boot) on a Pico.

I'm not sure how these broken builds went unchecked for so long, but things seem to be working... for now...

What's Changed

• Inky Frame: Sensible limit on SDCard speed. by @Gadgetoid in #450
• maintain cursive font for header after timer expires and script pulls… by @MatStace in #455
• MicroPython: Add ShiftRegister class. by @Gadgetoid in #456
• VL53L5CX: Alloc results data in MPY gc_heap. by @Gadgetoid in #454
• CI: Revert: wget ARM GCC toolchain by @Gadgetoid in #458
• Pico Scroll/Unicorn: Fix static memory alloc for Pico W. by @Gadgetoid in #457
• Create show_ip_address by @lesley-byte in #433
• Added documentation for Automation 2040W by @ZodiusInfuser in #453
• PicoW: Bump MPY to 5dbb822ca4a809ac5cb4513afb0411b4eb8dc3cf. by @Gadgetoid in #452
• PMS5003: Support for i2c version. by @Gadgetoid in #413

New Contributors

• @MatStace made their first contribution in #455
• @lesley-byte made their first contribution in #433

Full Changelog: v1.19.3...v1.19.4