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Presentation to Valparaiso hackers on the BBC Microbit

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Microbit Presentation

Introduction

The Microbit is a microcontroller created by the BBC in a continuing trend to bring younger generations into the world of programming and IOT. And to that end, I think the makers of the Microbit did a fantastic job:

  • The device is fitted with a number of onboard sensors, buttons, leds, and more.
  • The libraries available for the Microbit's programming are incredibly easy to work with.
  • The power consumption is incredibly low compared to a pi or arduino. Two triple A batteries that last a looong time.
  • Numerous programming languages work well with the micro bit, including drage and drop languages for newcomers
  • A basic kit, complete with micro-to-usb cable and triple A battery pack, is about 17 dollars(with shipping around 25 dollars)

Interested? They can be purchased at the following link https://www.adafruit.com/product/3362.

Truly Basic Specs

A couple of basic details: ARM Cortex-M0 32 bit processor, 16KB RAM, nRF51 Application Processor

Full specs available at http://tech.microbit.org/hardware/

What are the Microbit's IO capabilities?

  1. Accelerometer
  2. Compass, both for direction and detection of magnetic field strength
  3. 25 LEDs
  4. 2 programmable buttons
  5. bluetooth (not compatible with micropython)
  6. 2.4 GHZ transceiver for radio
  7. 3 GPIO pads, 3v out, and ground connection. Additionally, one can use the led pins for a total of 19 pins.
  8. temperature sensor – meant for the cpu but does an okay job detecting ambient room temp

What do the libraries offer?

Everything and the kitchen sink, practically:

  1. robotic speech library. Connect headphones to pins 0 and ground with alligator clips and listen! The sound is fait, a separately powered speaker might be ideal.
  2. neopixel library - control arrays of neopixels wth your microbit! The microbit can power up to 8 neopixels at a time on its own, or all of them if the neopixels are powered separately.
  3. Gestures library - because we have an accelerometer on board, the microbit is also able to sense gestures such as shake, up, down, left, right, or fall.
  4. LED Library - Easily light up the matrix with the images provided by the library. You can also input some text that will be displayed in a scroll fashion across the leds (this feature is very handy and is used in runtime error reporting).

Programming Languages and Editors

There are a number of languages available for the microbit:

  • Microsoft Touch
  • Microsoft Blocks
  • Javascript (Code Kindom)
  • Micropython (Mu offline text editor is what I have used, located here https://github.com/mu-editor/mu)

Note: I have used Mu on Raspberry Pi and Windows without issue, Ubuntu was problematic.

More information on available editors at https://www.microbit.co.uk/create-code

Demonstration Projects

I have create a few projects to demonstrate the capabilities of the microbit. Links may be found below:

Basic Examples - https://github.com/mabiesen/microbit_basic_examples

In Home Alarm System - https://github.com/mabiesen/microbit_alarm_system

My version of the Firefly project - https://github.com/mabiesen/microbit_pass_the_light

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Presentation to Valparaiso hackers on the BBC Microbit