MicroPythonOS graphical operating system delivers Android-like user experience | Hacker News Reader

MicroPythonOS graphical operating system delivers Android-like user experience

cnx-software.com

255 pointsmikece119 comments

Open articleView on HN

Interesting.

https://micropythonos.com/

https://github.com/MicroPythonOS/MicroPythonOS

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/9GGXNF-micropythonos-...

Indeed much better resource than this ads ridden page…

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

Have u tried it with mobile safari on arbitrary iOS?

Say goodbye to most ads with Brave or Vivaldi, with adblockers enabled (EasyList, EasyPrivacy, ADB+, Fanboy's Annoyances List).

I prefer viewing the text-only version of this HN site, it loads fast and clean with no ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/

You realise the vast majority of people seeing your comment are on news.ycombinator.com and have no idea what you're talking about?

The parent comment mentioned ads, hence my response and the link to the text-only site.

They said the links provided by their parent were better than 'this' page, which presumably refers to the submission, not (some undisclosed alternate ad-ridden frontend to) HN.

That really reads like an ad.

It is true though.

Except Chrome, other Chromium browsers have effective filters/blockers for ads and annoyances. I find Brave's GUI to be very intuitive and fast, and one can disable its crypto features and other nonsense.

But in past year, I've noticed Brave is broken on popular sites like Reddit, so I have recently switched ditches it and switched over to Vivaldi.

Vivaldi is fast and nice, with a clean interface, though it is slower in its Windows variant as it has lots of features compared to other Chromium browsers.

I have Firefox as secondary browser, I especially like its extensions support: uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger are great at adblocking and annoyances filtering. But Firefox is a bit cumbersome in its UI, and I felt it is slower especially in its Windows variant

Firefox had some memory leakage problem, so I had avoided it for years, but it's become better in its latest versions, I don't seem to encounter the memory leakage issue anymore.

I steer clear of Chrome (disabled it on all my phones and tablets) due to Google's penchant for ads-based revenue, though its corporate avatar as Microsoft Edge is quite efficient and effective as a daily workhorse.

Wow, these preassembled ESP32 plus touchscreen boards are extremely cheap, and there are tons of them in all kinds of different form factors on Amazon. I didn't realize this kind of thing was so plentiful, this seems like a great way to bootstrap many kinds of electronics/IoT projects

Any commercial products using ESP?

I think there are plenty using espressif chips. One of my robot vacuums (possibly the Neato?) certainly appeared to be.

Just look for ESP32 CYD - CYD stands for cheap yellow display. There are a lot of variants.

https://github.com/witnessmenow/ESP32-Cheap-Yellow-Display?t... . I bought mine for about $12 and it's been quite fun tinkering with it.

AFAIK my humidifier uses an ESP32 chip.

A lot of Shelly devices use ESP chips: https://www.shelly.com/ - And they are hackable!

https://templates.blakadder.com/esp32.html

Here’s a list of just a few. They’re insanely popular not only because they’re just good to use, but also because they’re one of the cheaper FCC approved modules you can buy, which takes a lot of the pain out of bringing a product to market.

Yes, many. As a random example, see: https://www.servethehome.com/ubiquiti-flex-mini-2-5g-review-...

The last image on the page shows various chips in the switch, the top left is an ESP32.

Interesting, seems like they're just using it as a MCU? Specs don't mention anything wireless, and I don't see an antenna.

If you pick a smart device that has WiFi connectivity, then there's about a 50% chance that it has an ESP inside.

Loads, you can usually tell if something is limited to 2.4Ghz only.

Cabled up an EVSE the other day and the brains of that was a ESP32 chip.

My "smart" resistive water heater uses an ESP for Wifi connectivity, so it can heat the water when the electricity prices are low for example.

(my older) LIFX bulbs have an Espressif MAC address, and I think LIFX has stated they're ESP32-based in the past

You can find the fcc notices in manuals if you search on espressif’s module grantee code which is 2AC7Z. Espressif is extremely widely used.

Yeah ESP32 is an awesome rabbit hole. An esp32-c6, cheap yellow display, and a 3d printer and you can build some really interesting things.

So, am I right in assuming that ESP32, being simple and slow, isn't going to have cache lines or anything, and would just need 1-2 cycles to access its RAM? In which case a pointer-chasing dynamic language like python wouldn't have all of the typical performance penalties from constant cache misses?

EDIT: upon further research, I think the above assumptions are more or less all wrong, starting with the "simple" part. To start with, they're Harvard-architecture-ish with separate memory pathways - and caches - for data and instructions, so off the bat they have more heterogeneity than your modern general purpose CPUs. Also there seems to be a very wide variety of memory mappings, buses, and caching systems within ESP32 "family". [1]

[1] https://developer.espressif.com/blog/2024/08/esp32-memory-ma...

ESP32 is still much better than this,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PC1512

Which was my introduction to PCs, playing Defender of the Crown at the school computer club.

Micro python is the last hope for Python. Python simplicity got destroyed by a bunch of new wave of programmers who packed a lot of new useless features into it in the past 10 yrars. Now it's NOT easy and small language as it used to be...

Feature creep is an awful side effect. I would love to have language having just few add-ons per decade so I can grasp it all

Which useless features?

All of them. Starting with syntax changes or type hints.... (Python should be always and only be duck typed forever as designed by God itself (it's creator).

> Python should be always and only be duck typed forever as designed by God itself (it's creator).

Isn't Guido the one who came up with type hints spec and made the reference implementation (Mypy)?

The issue is that duck typing with a minimal set of types was the great idea of ABC, which is the language Guido cloned to make Python

No, mypy existed before the type hints spec, and was created by Jukka Lehtosalo; Guido did, once he encountered it, work to make sure mypy could work with Python rather than being a separate, python-like language, and the type hints spec was a big part of that.

OK, so this is a troll.

async is the big one. it was half-baked

Yeah, async Python is one of the top 2 things that I just get pissed off when I think about it too much. Along with Lin-Manuel Miranda not being involved with Moana 2.

Amazing. We have actually gone full circle reactionary on the typing debate where duck typing is considered the "traditional" way by some.

Static typing and duck typing both date back to the 1950s. You may have heard of Lisp.

The last new significant thing invented in programming was OOP in the 1990s.

Everything else is just ancient, OOP was about bringing the benefits of micro-services to single computer environments. Yes, you read that right

The new ECS system for 3d games was used by the first computer drawing program Sketchpad in 1963.

Programming is mostly just recycling ideas around and around.

> Static typing and duck typing both date back to the 1950s. You may have heard of Lisp.

> The last new significant thing invented in programming was OOP in the 1990s.

OOP is from the 1960s (Simula 67 is generally recognized as the first OOP language.) Probably not actually the last new significant thing invented in programming, though.

Walrus operator, match. They're just syntax sugar, but expand the vocabulary for little benefit.

>> "the last hope for Python"

Python is in the top 3 programming languages in the world.

Being lingua franca of AI and scripting world isn't enough for GP.

This is kind of a strange take to me given that Python is quickly becoming the default for many projects that 1) are not indexing for speed/efficiency and 2) is not on the web (and sometimes this only applies for frontend). There are plenty of cases where that statement is incorrect but I think you get my point.

I think I read a title on HN that was literally titled “Why Python Won” in late 2025.

I know Python since version 1.6, it was never simple, people that don't read the reference manuals are the ones that think that is a BASIC like language in complexity, when in reality it has always been more into Common Lisp / C++ kind of sense.

I still do not understand how Python won out over lua. Which is imho the superior scripting language just constrained by a smaller userbase. Lua is like embeddable in what 500 KiB. While python takes its about 200 to 300 MiB

I think Lua is an interesting language and I really like it having TCO, so that I can properly write recursive logic like in a Scheme. However, I am somewhat worried about data structures. When I read about Lua, it always seems quite thin on that front. On the other hand I just looked up Lua data structures and found a book called "Programming in Lua" and the first page I read was about "tables", which I assume to be something like dictionaries in Python, and it says that arrays and others are implemented on top of "tables". What about immutable data structures? Are there libraries for purely functional data structures? How complete are they?

These things I don't usually look up for Python, because Python is clearly not a very functional language and doesn't have the immutable data structures at all, and doesn't even feature TCO, so basically Python is mostly lost, when it comes to doing FP, and I accept, that it is not really that kind of language. I only try to use FP knowledge to avoid common pitfalls, when coding in Python. But from Lua I would expect better.

Batteries included and a more sane language.

Also Lua is kind of frozen in version 5.1, if one cares about performace, while even if CPython only recently got JIT love, there are several other alternatives.

No viral license in Python, very easy to link to libraries with python.

not sure which means more, but the second is definitely critical.

Lua has lots of ugly syntax and is 1-indexed. That's probably the only reason it never took off.

I don't think being 1-indexed is what made the reason.

While it was already in widespread use, Python really took off in the scientific/research community, thanks first to numpy and then to all the other libraries built on top of it up to the current crop of ML/AI libraries.

Those people used to write a lot code in Fortran, Matlab and R (depending on their research area) which are all 1-indexed.

Will MicroPythonOS also work with CircuitPython?

CircuitPython docs > Differences from MicroPython: https://docs.circuitpython.org/en/latest/README.html#differe...

Also, there's pipkin: https://github.com/aivarannamaa/pipkin#pipkin :

> Tool for managing distribution packages for MicroPython and CircuitPython on target devices or in a local directory.

> Supports mip- and upip-compatible packages, and regular pip-compatible packages

Hopefully - for 3 types of packages - pipkin supports GPG signatures, PyPI's TUF, and/or sigstore attestations like pip?

Just checked; pip doesn't support checking PEP740 attestations yet either?

pipkin: https://github.com/aivarannamaa/pipkin

trailofbits/pip-plugin-pep740: https://github.com/trailofbits/pip-plugin-pep740

Love me some MicroPython. Building a product line of small farm security devices that use uPy and MQTT.

Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by small farm security device?

First product is called SecureCoop, that either opens the coop door or monitors another coop opener, then sends phone notifications if there are issues. Door didn't open on time, door is stuck, etc.

Next product will be battery security cameras trained on predator models (raccoon, fox, snake). Then the next one will be an electric fence monitor. All solar powered.

Basically going for back yard security for small hobby farms.

Biggest hurdle has been that I only knew 5% of what I needed to know to do this. Haha. Many mistakes. But now am close to visiting the FCC lab for SDoC verification, and then I can legally sell.

Thanks for asking!

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45525804

Looks better than any Python GUI framework I’ve seen..

Can we port it to Intel, I wonder...?

It uses LVGL https://github.com/lvgl/lvgl

Oh that explains why it's fast!

LVGL... fast? It's used on meshtastic devices, and I've always felt it was rather clunky. /shrug

Is it possible to make a fast UI on say, an ESP32?

Wish I knew... I'm half way towards looking for companies who make white label android devices for a project of mine... I originally wanted to go stm32, but as soon as you add a touchscreen and want a responsive gui, my only options seemed like "smart displays" with pre-rendered ui graphics, or a full blown arm device. /shrug

Now I am curious what you're working on :-)

Yes, see MS-DOS games. Now skills to do it 30 years later is another matter.

Is it possible though? I have never seen an LVGL demo (just plain C) able to present a demo or animation that is as "smooth" as a MS-DOS game on say a 486. Not that the 486 was butter smooth but it's not quite there. Maybe its the interface for the screen?

Well it runs at 20 Mhz, like a Motorola 68020 (Apollo DomainOS), so I would say, yes.

Microsoft has difficulties drawing (rounded) rectangles at 2 - 4 GHz but that's another issue.

But Motorola 68k in say... the Amiga (I don't know Apollo) would have additional chips for sprites and blitting, right? And the ESP - despite being extremely fast, doesn't have that extra support. So you need CPU... + tricks, DMA, triple buffering etc

Where are you getting 20MHz from? The OG ESP32 is a dual-core 240MHz micro...

I've been looking into this recently. It seems to be possible with the right kind of controller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWtTmmne6Bo

Also the newer esp32-p4s have MIPI DSI onboard which apparently can do smooth HD.

I reckon you've never seen flet.

https://flet.dev

That looks interesting. I had not heard of flet.

How do you like it? How easy is it to work withe the layout controls?

It's a mixed bag, as it's still not stable (esp as very recently declarative support was added in what was likely a mostly-rewrite). But when it works, it works great (I've only tried on Linux and Android).

Neat. I'm skimming the documentation now and it looks like something worth keeping an eye on.

I have so many long-running scripts that I sometimes set up with TUIs or quick PyQt/PySide GUIs but the GUIs always seem overkill and the TUIs always leave me lacking. flet looks like a good in-between of the two.

I'd say it definitely makes building GUIs more simple and intuitive than the Qt and Tk frameworks at least. And very important for me, it's fully cross-platform (for the most popular platforms anyway). I must admit that the imperative style does start to become painful as complexity increases, which led to me dropping it for a while, and so the declarative update is welcome even though it takes some time for me to mentally grep.

How does it compare to Beeware?

Far easier to use. I never got beyond just trying to setup Beeware; became overwhelmed by complexity. Flet, you install it like any other Python package and start coding your UI. It's one of those rare things that just works(tm).

Python code and resource-constraint device don't seem like a good combo in terms of performance. Is it just for prototyping?

Only in the same sense as interpreted BASIC in 8 bit home computers, with their 64 KB RAM, single digit MHz, tape loading.

Good for prototyping and introduction to programming, then you had to switch to Assembly for anything meaningful.

Here, you might switch to Assembly like in those days, or maybe C, C++, Rust, Zig, whatever.

Some I know use it in production for iot in remote factories where internet isn't reliable.

If anything needs to be fixed, anyone with a computer can connect on the USB port and push new pythons files, without the need of an up to date dev environment.

Usually performance isn't that important as those devices handle a few events per second.

Interesting. Would want to see this going on actual Android. Especially since I have a few Python GUI projects going which I intend to use on Android (but currently using flet).

https://flet.dev

It’s LVGL based, if the GUI and widgets are what you wanted you could use that on Android, although if you have access to native Android this actually doesn’t seem like the best approach to me.

The primary goal I've been seeking for a while now (and which so far only flet has reasonably fulfilled) is the ability to dynamically create GUIs. Like I created a REPL app which works similar to the regular Python REPL, but also if the code entered at the prompt returns a control/component, it shows that control with full functionality. No need to compile anything, esp on another device. And it's a standalone app, not a frontend to a server or even a web view.

I would love to have this, but Lua not Python.

Mathematicians don't build GUIs, and nobody else can stand starting their arrays with 1.

Lua also let's you start arrays at 3.

As does Perl with `$[`[0][1]

[0] "This variable stores the index of the first element in an array, and of the first character in a substring."

[1] With the caveat: 'As of Perl v5.30.0, or under "use v5.16", or "no feature "array_base"", $[ no longer has any effect"'

You can start your arrays in Lua at 0. Conventionally you don't, but you can.

Plenty of languages use either 1 as base or flexible array indexes.

And we can make fun of them equally, there's enough mocking to go around.

I wonder how hard to port this to eLua would be? The bigger problem is probably packing.

Pip can work fine with MicroPython. LuaRocks can be a pain, even on desktop.

I don't understand, unless I'm misreading this OS has no memory protection. In other words: it can't run applications! And this is not fixable! You can never risk executing untrusted or semi-untrusted code with permissions on something like this.

I've always thought that it would be quite simple to pull "an android" but based on wasm (even perhaps using wasm-in-kernel execution). Quite simple, that is, compared to what Android achieved with Java. But this, this just can't work.

how does it compare to https://github.com/wasp-os/wasp-os?

Does this support installing normal Python versions on top, and then developing apps in normal Python? What is the language one writes apps in?

The docs say: "Developers: Learn how to install, build, and extend MicroPythonOS with new apps and features." -- But how? What are app devs using?

Reasonably, that language is MicroPython [1] which is the special pared-down version of Python for memory-constrained embedded targets.

[1]: https://micropython.org/

I couldn't quickly find a comparison table or similar, to see what parts of Python are not supported by MicroPython. So I asked an LLM and it listed quite a substantial amount of modules of the standard library, that are a shame not to have. No logging module? No multiprocessing? No json, no xml? And the list goes on, including many very useful modules. One can probably somehow get by, installing third party libraries, but then what is the point of being MicroPython, if you need to install tons of libraries to do basic things like reading a JSON file? And as I am currently working on a tkinter application, tkinter being on the list also makes me think: "What a pity, cannot port that to MicroPython."

This is just my first superficial look at it and it is also based on LLM info, which doesn't have to be correct, but if it is correct, then it feels a little disappointing.

Perhaps for more serious app development, it would be good to have real Python and interface with MicroPython for the hardware controlling stuff.

Always double-check an LLM, particularly when it's just a quick(er) search away:

https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/genrst/index.html

Specifically: JSON is built-in, logging is available. There's no multiprocessing (it is designed for a micro, after-all - and note that thread is available on some ports), no built-in XML lib.

Be sure to check micropython-lib, the MicroPython Awesome List and mim for others.

https://github.com/micropython/micropython-lib

https://awesome-micropython.com/

https://checkmim.com/

MicroPython is primarily for embedddd devices with on the order of 1 MB of RAM and FLASH. And applications which makes sense with such constraints. If you have hundreds of MB of RAM, better to just use CPython.

Does it run on the CYD? https://github.com/witnessmenow/ESP32-Cheap-Yellow-Display

No, it says my ESP32 is not supported. I'd love to get it to run there, though.

"it says" - where did you find info on HW support? Or did you try to build and flash the thing yourself?

Yeah I tried to flash and the online flasher refused.

Thx. Perhaps have another try with https://pypi.org/project/esptool/ .

I will, it might just be the flashing parameters that are wrong.

Really cool. How can this be fast? I'd have thought that Python (even MicroPython) would just be unsuitable for certain things like the graphics and animations, at the very least.

Later realized it's because it uses lvgl under the hood.

I'd use it. I'd be curious to see how close to daily driving it is for stuff like calls, SMS, and email. Something not driven by a giant data mining company would be splendid.

Would it be possible to slap this on top of FreeRTOS?

On ESP32, it is: MicroPython is implemented on top of the ESP-IDF, Espressif’s development framework for the ESP32. This is a FreeRTOS based system. https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/esp32/general.html#te...

While cool, it certainly won't be delivering Android-like performance, due to the lack of JIT and AOT compiler, coupled with PGO metadata, shared via the PlayStore across devices.

Does it support the threading module?

But I don't want an "Android-like user experience", I want something that works and doesn't make me want to pull my hair out and fly to Silicon Valley and punch someone in the face.

> Android-like user experience

so crap. No inovation those days.

What would you have wanted to see?

At the first look: clear delimitation of UI elements, usable scrollbars.

I mean I kind of get your frustration, but I don't think innovating the user interface is not really the goal of this project, the opposite actually, it's moreso trying to provide a well-known user interface to devices where that was previously hard, so the goal is to be similar.

I would like to see some fresh ideas in UI though, everything is the same nowadays... :(

It's FOSS, so you can use it primarily for output with real switches and knobs for input. But then just using plain LVGL would probably be more practical.

MIT lisenced; feel free to fork it if your feeling especially filial

I really wish people would stop trying to innovate with user interfaces. In a comment below you criticize this UI because it doesn't have delimited interface elements. I agree that non-delimited user interface is really bad, but I attribute that mostly to Microsoft's flat design innovation, which I didn't like at the time, and I still wish I hadn't had so much influence.

As for invisible scroll bars, again we agree. But I think that was Apple. I'm sure somebody will correct me if it wasn't.

That "Android-like" is based on LVGL which is a brilliant GUI framework for ESP32 (not invented for this project) when you consider the low capacities of the hardware and how efficiently it pulls the animations.

If Android had such GUI, it would be a heck lot faster and drink less energy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com