[Andy]’s keypad uses the very affordable Seeeduino Xiao, a tiny board that natively runs Arduino code. Since it has a SAMD21 processor, [Andy] chose to run CircuitPython on it instead.

Developing in CircuitPython is easy because the entire environment — the code, toolchain, and the devices — are all extremely portable.

CircuitPython is a programming language designed to simplify experimenting and learning to code on low-cost microcontroller boards. With CircuitPython, there are no upfront desktop downloads needed.

The Adafruit team have this week announced the release of CircuitPython 8.0.0, the latest major revision of CircuitPython, and is a new stable release.