Are there any details on the specs of the Micro Bit?

It’s somewhat amusing that the Pi is now a ‘full computer’. And I’d be interested to read about why it was felt that the Pi was too complex to be a first computer. It seems the BBC disagree with the Pi foundation here, but the Pi foundation have quite a few cute videos of kids programming to back up their position.

They need to give a few to the old 1980’s hackers (like me) so we can support the kids who get these things. My youngest is too old unless he mugs a year seven kid (or he mugs one of his mate’s younger brother/sister). He’s in year 11 in September and ineligible for this give-away.

Clearly I’m about the same age as Clive, in my case 1963 was a good vintage.

I like the concept of the Micro Bit, I just hope that they make them available for purchase as well as giving them away to the year 7 children.

Wow. A big day. A big announcement.

Hope that this initiative will inspire similar activities elsewhere globally (…slightly jealous here in France) being part of the original BBC Micro generation on the other side of the Irish Sea “back in the day”.

Here’s hoping that this educational wave will cross the Channel as well. Bravo!

Its a pity that they decided that the Pi was “too complicated”, so they’re reinventing the wheel to a certain extent.

The Micro Bit as currently demonstrated, needs a companion PC to run the Scratch-like programming environment and transfer the compiled code onto the Micro Bit. Its all rather like an Arduino (the chip looks like a Mega2650, or one of its siblings, to me) and they’ve obviously chosen a visual block programming environment as the C like arduino IDE would be a barrier to entry for the target audience. As well as the LED matrix, it looks like there are some pads for digital IO at the bottom of the board.

However it does look fun. I wonder how many they expect to have on hand come September? Its all very well giving One Per Child starting secondary school, but what are they going to do about replacing the lost, stolen, broken, DOA systems?

ANd are they going to be released onto the general market? And if so, for how much? They aren’t expensive things to produce. Build up a community around the little things, and it’ll go places that the BBC and their commercial partners would never dream of!

Is promoting similarities to an 18-certificate video game, which features prostitution and drugs, as part of a project entirely aimed at school children, really a wise move?

http://www.pegi.info/en/index/global_id/505/?searchString=grand+theft+auto+v

The tabloids will have a field day with this. The GTA part of the project needs to be rethought, renamed and distanced from GTA, urgently.

(I *love* playing GTA. It’s a *brilliant* game. But I’m 43. I don’t play it before my children go to bed.)

Intellivision > Atari

As Microsoft are one of the 9 formal partners I would guess that the coding environment will be Windows primarily.

Pink adoption in schools has been hobbled because the schools have a large dependency on old stock VGA only monitors.

This is great for most schools in the UK.

But are there resources for Welsh medium schools? We need creators of Welsh language technologies as well.

The kids in Ysgol Garndolbenmaen had a lot of fun with our Welsh translation and adaptations of the Raspberry Pi Turing Test Lessons (https://github.com/PorthTechnolegauIaith/turing-test-lessons) and coding a Welsh speaking Rapiro robot (http://techiaith.org/2015/03/diolch/)

In my opinion this is a waste of money. The things has a USB port and thus needs a master computer to program. It seems you can detach it and see it running standalone: fine. I don’t see how this adds anything substantial to learning to work with a computer.

Love it.

From the picture looks like ATmega32U4-AU.
This is the same IC used on the Arduino Leonardo.
Using this image:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-03/12/bbc-micro-bit-hands-on/viewgallery/343370
The LED matrix is wired directly to 10 I/O lines on the header pins on the right. Shows 18 pins. So if using the header you will also be activating the LEDs.
Great for debugging as shows clearly when a pin is active.
It also looks like the 2 push buttons are tied to the header as well.
Can’t see C0-C5. Connections must be on the reverse side.

From a hardware standpoint I’d expect not to hard for someone with prior knowledge to reverse engineer. It would be great if released Open Source/Creative Commons Commercial so it can be sold after the million.

Use with something like Scratch for Arduino (http://s4a.cat/) and that’s probably most of the way there.

It will be interesting to see if the bootloader is the same as the Arduino and also to see what other functionality is included in the built in sketch. Might have added functionality built in to allow for things like scrolling messages and not just flashing LEDs.

Looking forward to seeing how this progresses.

I think that regarding it as a “springboard to full computers such as the Raspberry Pi” is somewhat missing the point and the fundamental advantage this has over the RPi. The RPi can be used as a general purpose computer to load and run other peoples’ software and you need never do anything particularly creative with it at all. The MicroBit on the other hand does nothing interesting *until* you program it – and that is where the skills shortage is. It is likely to get near 100% of those that use it actually coding, whereas the proportion is likely much lower for the RPi.

I am an embedded systems developer and the great majority of embedded software runs on platforms like this, with a few Kb of memory, no display, no file system, no networking, and in particular no complex resource hungry operating system. The trouble with encouraging the notion that you need to “move up” to a “full computer” to do useful or serious work is that no one ends up with the skills necessary to wok in hard real-time resource constrained systems.

As much as I like the RPi, I think the MicroBit has the potential to fulfil RPi’s original intent, and fills a gap in the computing spectrum that the RPi vacated when it got carried away with how much technology and software layers you could get for £25. The MicroBit looks like a sub £4 computer to me.

I’d heard this was coming (I know of someone who knows someone involved in developing it) but as a teacher in a secondary school I had no idea they were going to give them away to year 7s. Will I get one to play with and demo to the class? When will they arrive? Is there a form to fill in saying how many year 7s I have. etc. etc. etc

Really looks interesting but the logistics of getting them into classrooms and getting used will be interesting – September isn’t that long away in teaching terms and if they don’t give them to teachers early then the chances of them being used well in lessons next academic year are remote!

If I want to plan a scheme of work around them then I need to play!

If you look close at the hook, you will notice 4 prototype micro bits concealed in this raspberry pi powered internet enabled coat hook http://www.raspberrypi.org/hook-yrs-birmingham/

Using GTA themed resources to teach kids is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard all month. What are they thinking? Have they actually played it? It’s a great game but 18 rated for a reason.

I’m impressed and jealous. There is a lot of innovation in your education system now, here in Poland we teach at schools only dry programming theory without hardware interaction. This is a very big mistake, you can’t teach new technologies without real life appliances.

According to PISA research you have to do a lot to improve education, but this step is in good direction. Hope someone in polish MEN will monitor you progress. In Poland if you want to teach uC – you have to pay for it on your own.

Would be good to get hold of one for local pi jams too so that the younger members who do attend have a chance to hack with it, so when there are new users, they have a user base to get help from.

I find myself helping new users at Pi jams, so being able to either help or ask a young person at a pi jam to help with this would be very useful.

These look great and should really liven-up classes with Year 7 next year! I’m hoping it’ll be possible to get a few in advance to plan a scheme of work… and it would be a shame if no clone becomes available as it would be nice to continue with classes in future years.

As for the processor, the photo certainly does look like a ATmega32u4 but I’m sure one article (can’t remember which) talked of a Cortex-M0. Presumably too far in to development to switch processor now, though?!

Interesting that, when the first prototypes of the Pi were demonstrated, it was explained that the BBC didn’t do that sort of thing any more for commercial reasons (they’re a public funded monopoly). And yet now, four years later, they’re prepared to spend enough to fund a million of these mini-arduinos.

The BBC Micro helped inspire a generation because it was a real computer – the Pi is the nearest equivalent of that computer whereas, I’m afraid, this trinket looks like a toy. I’d rather see the BBC throw its weight behind the Pi as I think it’d have much greater long term impact.

If the BBC have spent licence payers’ money on the development of this kit then it should be made available to all those who wish to purchase it. If it is only to be made available to a single set of 11 year olds this would be a criminal waste of effort. Some 11 year olds will not yet be ready for it while others could make good use of it at 8.

I’ve been teaching computing in schools since the 60’s and find Arduino boards (especially the Dagu Mini Driver (£10), with analogue to digital ports, voltage regulator, and twin H bridges for motors, PWM for servos and standard digital pins) an ideal first step into building battery powered floor robots. You can program it from your Pi and build your robot from second hand Lego or cardboard.

“So the early 1980s was basically rubbish and we were all sad.”

Brilliant!!! You captured it perfectly!

I predict the first program created by a student (that’s not a school assignment) will be to spell profanity in that 5×5 LED matrix. You read it here first.

What a ludicrous waste of time and money.
Beebs obviously has NO comprehension of the skill levels of the average 11-year-old.
Students will rebel against this insult to their intelligence by “losing” the devices.
The only technology-challenged player in this fiasco is the BBC.

The BBC MicroBit and the accompanying ‘portal’ is a brilliant development that will hopefully hook Primary kids onto exploring Raspberry Pi and or Arduino later on. OK so it’s funded by US the ‘licence payers’ – so what ?? I’m happy to see future generations being Digital Literate – we have great things to come :P

I think it would be good if it could also be used as a HAT-board. I don’t mean it would have a HAT-socket from start, but one should be able to solder one to it. It would establish a standard of how to connect a 32u4 to a Raspberry Pi. It is possible to us a 32u4 to build a full computer, see https://halfbyteblog.wordpress.com/tag/arduino-tv-out/ But one might change the language TinyBASIC to something else e.g. Sinclair BASIC. So the best thing would be if one could use it as a HAT and a stand-alone computer (with keyboard and screen) at the same time.

There is an IDE called Minibloq that works with 32u4 that is similar to Scratch, but generates C++ and Python code. The Sparki-robots also use a version of Minibloq. It would be good if Minibloq could run natively on Raspberry Pi. Arduino already works.