The PewPew Ecosystem

Published on 2022-05-27 in PewPew LCD.

PewPew LCD is a very simple device: just a display and a microcontroller. The real power for it comes from the whole PewPew ecosystem, that has been growing over the years witch each new workshop.

There is a lot of documentation, starting with the pew library reference , through the basic  bouncing ball tutorial , to the more advanced sokoban tutorial .

There is documentation for all the hardware devices , and also pewmulator , a program that lets you run PewPew games on your computer with regular Python.

And for those who want to extend the PewPew devices, there is a whole section on connecting various electronic components to the expansion connector, and controlling them from code. This lets you not only add additional effects to your games,  or use non- standard ways of controlling them, but also lets you reuse the device for your electronic projects, whether it’s a plant monitoring system, a smart home controller, or some kind of remote control for a robot.

Finally there is a community page, that links to the mailing list for the project, the repositories with code and hardware designs, and the CircuitPython Discord server, where you can get help.

Finally, in the repositories you can find all the games:

• snake

• tetris

• othello

• sokoban

• boulder

• lightsout

• breakout

• frog

They can both give you inspiration and serve as starting points for your own games.

Hopefully, with further workshops and with more people discovering the joy of making simple games this ecosystem will continue to grow and improve.

However, on the PewPew LCD you are not limited to just the PewPew ecosystem! Because it comes with CircuitPython’s displayio, you can use the display for anything, not just 8x8 pixels for simple games. And if you really want to, you could it even program it with Arduino or any other environment available for SAMD21, to really leverage the power of that  tiny microcontroller — there is, however, no ready support for this, so you would be mostly on your own.\