So you've happily used the Raspberry Pi for your homelab projects, of course with Python based solutions as we all do. You've been down the rabbit hole with everything about temperature and humidity measurements, energy and solar tracking, video recording and time-lapse photography, object detection and security surveillance.

You don't just buy these things of the shelve. You want to deeply understand what it takes to create such a thing, and you've been quite happy with your results so far, learned a lot.

But for many simple applications ... the power draw! Yes, it's just 5 Watts you say for using a Raspberry Pi. Not a big deal in terms of cost. But you'll always need a power adapter and a free socket.

You've heard of these guys using microcontrollers that run on batteries or even solar, for days, weeks, even months.

That's exciting, but there's also a catch. These people write code in C-like languages, they build firmware to make their projects run. And it's all bare metal! That seems very different. That'll be a steep learning curve to take ... Or is it?

Well, there's MicroPython to the rescue. Let me take you with me on a journey to make a simple microcontroller based application to read a Power Meter and send the readings over WiFi for more in depth processing somewhere else.