My brother got me a BBC micro:bit for my birthday. I decided to have a play around with it to see what it can do – its a pretty good ecosystem – you can edit code in python, load it to the device using bluetooth from your mobile and its battery powered! (I discovered these things in a few minutes) I’ll need to see what I can do with it from my laptop :)
There is a project webiste at microbit.co.uk with loads of tutorials – mostly beginner things, but you need to start somewhere – the hardware page has lots of info about the sensors on the board- 2 programmable buttons, 3 AD i/o ports, an accelerometer and compass, an array of 25
- LED’s, bluetooth 4 and a 16MHz arm chip! – the full list is:
- Nordic nRF51822 Multi-protocol Bluetooth® 4.0 low energy/2.4GHz RF SoC
- 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 processor (16MHz)
- 16kB RAM
- 256kB Flash
- Bluetooth Low Energy Master/Slave capable
- Input/Output
- 25 LED Matrix
- Freescale MMA8652 3-axis Accelerometer
- Freescale MAG3110 3-axis Magnetometer (e-compass)
- Push Button x2
- USB and Edge connector Serial I/O
- 2/3 reconfigurable PWM outputs
- 5 x Banana/Croc-clip connectors
- Edge connector
- 6 x Analog In
- 6-17 GPIO (configuration dependent)
- SPI
- i2c
The BBC micro:bit is based on the mbed HDK. The target MCU is a Nordic nRF51822 with 16K RAM, 256K Flash.
The microbit is aimed at kids, but it supports python (using MicroPython) – I’ll be interested to see how much python it supports, eg can you import scapy (you can find details about firmware, etc here) and you can find info on Mu, an editor for the microbit here
