We talk with Matt Trentini, Principal Software Engineer at Planet Innovation, about using MicroPython for professional embedded development—including medical devices. Matt shares how he was drawn back to embedded development after becoming jaded with traditional C-based workflows, and explains why MicroPython's interactive REPL and rapid development cycle have become game-changers for his team.
We talk with Matt Trentini, Principal Software Engineer at Planet Innovation, about using MicroPython for professional embedded development—including medical devices. Matt shares how he was drawn back to embedded development after becoming jaded with traditional C-based workflows, and explains why MicroPython's interactive REPL and rapid development cycle have become game-changers for his team.
We explore the practical realities of using an interpreted language on microcontrollers: how Planet Innovation uses it for Class B medical devices, what the performance trade-offs actually look like, and how features like the Unix port enable robust testing. Matt walks us through deployment considerations, explains how to integrate C code when needed, and shares compelling stories about real-time client demos that would be impossible in C++.
Whether you're skeptical about high-level languages in embedded systems or curious about alternatives to traditional development workflows, this conversation offers a grounded, engineering-focused look at what MicroPython can—and can't—do in production environments.
"It's hard to overstate how game changing the REPL is. Particularly as an embedded engineer, once you see that you can interactively talk to a peripheral, you can generate your own I2C, squirt it across and see what the peripheral does with it—suddenly driver development has just become easy to experiment with." — Matt Trentini
"My trite answer is that MicroPython is slow—10 to 100 times slower than C in the interpreter. But my flip side answer is that it can always be made as fast as C because you can always drop into C to write things." — Matt Trentini
"There was a moment in a recent project where we were discussing the workflow of a state machine with the client, and while we were on a call, another engineer was actually making changes to MicroPython code. Literally a couple minutes after we'd been hashing out the details, they showed the changes in the state machine using the REPL. The client was blown away—in 25 years of development, I have never had that kind of turnaround in C and C++." — Matt Trentini
"If you want to make a good friend of your electronics engineers, give them a build of MicroPython that can run on their custom board. In the past, they would typically be waiting for weeks or sometimes months before a software resource could be assigned. Now I can turn around a MicroPython build in a day or two, and they can test I2C, GPIOs, and UARTs themselves." — Matt Trentini
"The irony is that the people who have embedded C knowledge are actually the people that can benefit the most from MicroPython. It's like having a superpower—you understand what MicroPython is doing in the background, you know you're just effectively writing a lot less code." — Matt Trentini