If you've been to other hacker conferences like EMFCamp or MCH, you may be familiar with the tradition giving attendees interesting hardware on a lanyard instead of a traditional conference badge. Attendees are encouraged to experiment with and hack on the device both at the conference and afterwards.

This year at EMFCamp 2022, the conference badge was a USB thumb drive sized ESP32 device running MicroPython. It has a joystick, an accelerometer, the cutest little LiPo battery, and a lovely 135x240 pixel colour TFT display. It seemed like it would be a fun single-weekend exercise to write a little 3D renderer for it in Python.

It turned out to be a "fun" multi-weekend exercise, but I learned a lot that I'd like to share. I learned how to workaround problems in the tooling. I learned there were problems in the display driver. I learned about optimising Python. I learned how to write native MicroPython modules to rewrite some hot functions in C. I learned about optimising how the Python talks to the C. And I even learned how to contribute some improvements back to the MicroPython project.

I will bring the device with me, catch me after the talk to see it rendering Utah teapots up close.