Tips for making great apps - Pixel Badge ESP32 LED devboard

Here are some neat tricks to improve the usability of your apps:

Use `virtualtimers` instead of sleeping

An easy way to get started with writing Python apps is to just have a busy while loop that executes something and then sleep for a little while:

import time

def do_something():
    print('stuff')

while True:
    do_something()
    time.sleep(500)

However, time.sleep() blocks everything else whilst it’s sleeping. This means that for example button press handlers are not called during this sleep. That degrades the feel of your app, because e.g. pressing B to exit it now requires you to hold it for half a second. Not cool, eh?

Instead, we can do the exact same thing with virtualtimers:

import virtualtimers

def do_something():
    print('stuff')
    run_again_in = 500  # time until this function should run again, in ms
    return run_again_in

# Initialise the virtualtimers task, and register our function
virtualtimers.begin(100)
virtualtimers.new(0, do_something)  # run now, with 0 delay

In above snippet we ask virtualtimers to run do_something() once, and do_something() itself returns after how long it wants virtualtimers to call it again. By returning 500 every time, do_something() gets called every 500 ms (until virtualtimers.stop() is called, or the app is exited).

Use `uinterface`

The uinterface module has a lot of nifty functions to make it easy to do things in a pretty way for the user of your app. For example, to connect to wifi whilst showing a helpful animation, use:

import uinterface

# Connect to WiFi, or timeout after 10s of trying
uinterface.connect_wifi(10000)

To show text to the user without them having to wait for the entire message to scroll by if they already know what it will be:

import uinterface

uinterface.skippable_text('Super long message that you can skip by pressing either A or B')

Use virtualtimers instead of sleeping

Use uinterface

Use `virtualtimers` instead of sleeping

Use `uinterface`