I am learning a whole lot more about the constrained environment of the microprocessor. For a start, you don’t have a Linux command line! And, perhaps more insidious, you do not have much memory.

Platforms such as Arduino or Pyboard have very restricted memory spaces, and in essence you ‘sit’ within the Python interpreter and run commands there. Actually it is not fully like this, some implement a REPL or some implement a server that takes FTP or Telnet commands, but it is very different from working even in a small single-board computer such as a Raspberry Pi or Odroid which have full Linux, command line shells such as Bash, and even desktops/browsers.

What happened was that I was getting along well with my project displaying weather patterns on the e-ink device and started retrieving more and more details on the controller, however after a short few iterations got memory errors. Thinking this just to be a problem of garbage collection, I called that method and got better iterations – but still eventually crashed out. It seems that the Json parsers and whatnot are leaking memory and no amount of garbage collection will help – and the direct calls to URLs for the weather services surely isn’t helping!

So, refactor.

I’ve now split the code into two components: a server component most likely running under NodeRED on one of my SBCs, and the display component which will simply take the weather readings from the server and display them, concentrating on what it does best.

I may also get advantages by using this method as it can run on smaller embedded devices such as the ESP8266 which do low-power much better than the fuller devices such as the WiPy2. Who knows, maybe months of displays without resorting to replacing the batteries?