Hello, Tesselators!
TL;DR:
- We've been working on better Rust support, and would love for you to join us in the #rust-lang channel of the Tessel Slack.
- We are removing Python from first-class support due to lack of interest.
- Tessel 2 is in Sparkfun, where it can be purchased by itself or in the very exciting new Johnny Five Inventor's Kit, which includes great breadboardable tutorials.
- There have been some great conference talks on Tessel lately, especially this retrospective on the design lessons for embedded Node through Tessels 1 and 2.
- You can get more regular updates either by helping to write this newsletter, or by reading our meeting notes (or both!).
We've long been intrigued by the Rust Programming Language, and have lately been pushing forward for a more native Rust support experience, including easy deploy from the t2 command line tool.
We will have a beta version of Rust support available in the next CLI release. We're using a remote cross-compilation server to build Rust projects for Tessel (so you don't even need Rust installed on your computer) but plan to switch to defaulting to rustup in the near future so Rustaceans can easily cross-compile locally.
Currently, support is limited to blinking LEDs on Tessel 2, but our next step is to build out support for all the Tessel 2 hardware with the tessel-rust repository. We'll also need to port all of our module libraries from JavaScript to Rust; this could be an excellent way to learn more about Rust, so please get in touch in the #rust-lang channel of Tessel Slack if you're interested in contributing or reviewing code!
Ever since our announcement of Python on Tessel 2 last year, we've been waiting eagerly for a crowd of Pythonistas to charge in and excitedly exclaim, "I want that! I want to make that happen!"
However, we haven't seen it. The basic pathway for Python on Tessel 2 has been proven out, but we haven't heard from anyone who's interested in taking on full support - or even much interest for using it. So we're letting it go. You'll see it disappear from the homepage soon. We can always pick up from here if the enthusiasm arrives.
We're very excited to announce that a collaboration with Bocoup and Sparkfun has recently come to fruition in the form of the Johnny Five Inventor's Kit.
The Tessel 2-based kit focuses on electronics learning, with breadboards and standard electronic components rather than modules. If you've ever been interested in prototyping beyond Tessel modules, the detailed and beginner-friendly new experiment guide will walk you through it.
Recent Tessel talks:
- The Eternal Struggle: Node.JS in Embedded Devices: by Jon McKay, a retrospective on the Tessel project's attempts to run Node on embedded devices and the lessons they learned along the way
- Live Coding Tessel 2: Hello World to Web-controlled Device in 20 Minutes by Kelsey Breseman, demonstrating how to turn Tessel and sensors into a couple of useful devices within a few lines of code
- That Escalated Quickly! Prototyping IoT with JavaScript by Eirik Morland, a creative exploration of how hardware + Node lets you quickly connect data gathering equipment to computer-generated music libraries to let your homebrewed beers compose requiems, and more
In time for the 4th of July, try making your own any-color VR fireworks with this Tessel 2 + Oculus project by Ron Dagdag.
See Tesselators at events around the world:
- Kelsey and Flaki are speakers at RuhrJS in Bochum, Germany on July 2-3.
- Jon and Kelsey will give a Tessel 2 hackathon with prizes at Fullstack in London on July 13-16.
- Keep an eye out for more speaking announcements soon!
Want to give talks and join Tessel's speaker community? Find opportunities and make announcements on the #events-speaking channel of the Tessel Slack.
- On Tessel's command line, the latest releases include some patching and corrections, improvements to the crash reporter tool which helps us identify and debug issues, and some background work for multiple language support.
- In the firmware, recent releases have improved Windows USB driver support and added a few features to GPIO use of the module ports.
You can always find our weekly steering committee notes here for the cutting edge of Tessel Project updates.
Want to write this newsletter? It's an easy way to stay on top of Tessel development and be a participating member of the community. Reach out to @kelsey on Tessel Slack if you're interested.
Until next time,
the Tessel team