A couple years ago at PyCon I received a kit from Adafruit containing the Circuit Playground Express. After going through the Hello World examples I boxed it up I didn’t have a project ready to go. Fast forward to the winter of 2018 when I decided I would like to be able to start our Roomba away from home because of the noise it makes, and suddenly I had the project I was looking for. Digging around I found out about the Roomba Open Interface and set out to start talking to my Roomba with CircuitPython.

Recently I’ve heard about multiple people working on con badges and decided to try my hand at a simple take on the idea. Since I had just recently received my PyPortal Adabox I thought I would use that as my first platform to get started.

Introduced in Python 3.7 dataclasses are normal Python classes with some extra features for carrying around data and state. If you find yourself writing a class that is mostly attributes it’s a dataclass.

For more information see part one and part two

In the first article I mentioned that ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) is a specification for a database API creating a standard way for applications to interact with various databases via a series of translation and application layers. To create this standard abstraction ODBC has two components, the driver and the driver manager.