BBC's announcement: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36416862
BBC Micro:bit computer now available to all for £13
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: BBC Micro:bit computer now available to all for £13
#22Not a bad price compared to other nRF51 boards, but I wish they'd included a coin cell holder. Btw the best way to program these (if you want to do it the 'real' way) is using Yotta. http://yottadocs.mbed.com/tutorial/tutorial.html You can get started really quickly: 1. Install yotta 2. Start->Run Yotta 3. mkdir mything 4. cd mything 5. yt init 6. Paste some code in source/main.cpp 7. yt target bbc-microbit-gcc 8. yt…
I disagree. Getting started really really quickly would be 1. sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-none-eabi 2. make Instead, we have this extreme tool-bloat where a tiny tiny executable is produced using python, python-setup, cmake, libffi, libssl, clang, pip and finally yotta in addition to GCC and binutils (which is really all you should need). Can someone please explain to me this new trend of in-house tools and tool-blo…
Ok now how do you change targets to a different board (e.g. nRF51-DK), and have the LEDs and USB serial still work with no changes?
How do you install the BLE dependencies?
How do you use apt-get on Windows?
I agree it could be easier and also agree that Python and CMake are the wrong tools for the job, but frankly apt and make would be worse.
At least they seem to have designed the module description system fairly nicely so it could potentially be rewritten with a better architecture in future.
Re: BBC Micro:bit computer now available to all for £13
#23Available for £13 when you order 90. So you pay more than £1000!
Available for £13 when you order 1! https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/microbit
Full vendor list:
Preordering has started.
'For delivery in July'
CPC Farnell for bulk (school etc.) orders: http://cpc.farnell.com/bbc-microbit
Other stockists:
Kitronik: https://kitronik.co.uk/microbitpreorder
Pimoroni: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/microbit
The Pi Hut: https://thepihut.com/collections/microbit
Technology Will Save Us: https://www.techwillsaveus.com/shop/microbit/
Sciencescope: https://sciencescope.uk/product/bbc-microbit
Re: BBC Micro:bit computer now available to all for £13
#24"While the BBC micro:bit has Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) hardware it only has 16k of RAM. The BLE stack alone takes up 12k RAM which means there’s not enough room to (currently) run MicroPython. Future versions of the device may come with 32k RAM which would be sufficient. However, until such time it’s highly unlikely MicroPython will support BLE." [1] That's a shame. I mean, I know it can be accessed by programming t…
Why does the fact it can't run micropython and BLE at the same time put BLE out of reach?
Re: BBC Micro:bit computer now available to all for £13
#25So it has leds.
Is this enough to get kids interested in computers and programming? I have the feeling that they would need something where the distance between what they can do as users and as developers is much smaller. Otherwise they still may not see it as "the same thing". The iPad will still be an opaque thing they use to consume content.
I'm coming from growing up in the 80s with a ZX Spectrum. The distance between users and developers was so much smaller - you turned on the Spectrum and landed on a BASIC interpreter. A device that "has leds" and you need to program using some IDE outside of the device fails to convey the idea that "using" and "programming" are not separate things, but different points of a continuous spectrum (pun not intended).
I'm all for demystifying programming and computers for kids. There's this false belief that kids nowadays are "so good with tech" because they're 4 and they an use an iPad, but makes kids no better at tech than using a remote control makes them good at cinematography.
Maybe what we need is more like the Spectrum Next? http://www.specnext.com
EDIT: This may be closer to what I have in mind: http://uk.kano.me/products/kano-kit
Re: BBC Micro:bit computer now available to all for £13
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
respectfully, that's missing the point. The beauty of the BBC Micro is the stark hardware specification -- the limits are the point. That scarcity leads to different usage, different behavior, different learning patterns. If one wants to go poking around with modern languages, multi-tier applications, color-coding IDEs, etc. there is no shortage of modern computers available. But instead, if one wishes to learn the f…
> respectfully, that's missing the point. On the contrary, it seems you have missed my point, or at least, nothing that follows that statement directly contradicts it. Speaking of which, you state that the BBC micro:bit (the BBC Micro was a very different computer) is good for education, which I would certainly hope, since that's what it was designed for. However suggesting that teaching assembly language to 11 year…
High Level language statements can be easily translated to ARM assembly language(http://www.toves.org/books/arm/), easier than x86 in my opinion. 11/12 year olds should have no problem understanding it, after they've played around with the provided options for programming the micro bit. (https://www.microbit.co.uk/create-code)
Re: BBC Micro:bit computer now available to all for £13
#27So it has leds. Is this enough to get kids interested in computers and programming? I have the feeling that they would need something where the distance between what they can do as users and as developers is much smaller. Otherwise they still may not see it as "the same thing". The iPad will still be an opaque thing they use to consume content. I'm coming from growing up in the 80s with a ZX Spectrum. The distance be…
you turned on the Spectrum and landed on a BASIC interpreter. A device that "has leds" and you need to program using some IDE outside of the device
I think (not 100% sure though, but also see other comments and https://github.com/ntoll/microrepl) it can run micropython so that means you turn it on, run something to connect to it on the client and it drops you to a REPL. Not exactly the same principle as with the ZX but pretty close.
Re: BBC Micro:bit computer now available to all for £13
#28So it has leds. Is this enough to get kids interested in computers and programming? I have the feeling that they would need something where the distance between what they can do as users and as developers is much smaller. Otherwise they still may not see it as "the same thing". The iPad will still be an opaque thing they use to consume content. I'm coming from growing up in the 80s with a ZX Spectrum. The distance be…
> Maybe what we need is more like the Spectrum Next? http://www.specnext.com
Yet another site that shows crap all without JS enabled...
Anyways, the Ello M2 recently popped up on my RSS reader.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/knivd/ello-2m
It seems very much in tune with the early micros.
Re: BBC Micro:bit computer now available to all for £13
#29Not a bad price compared to other nRF51 boards, but I wish they'd included a coin cell holder. Btw the best way to program these (if you want to do it the 'real' way) is using Yotta. http://yottadocs.mbed.com/tutorial/tutorial.html You can get started really quickly: 1. Install yotta 2. Start->Run Yotta 3. mkdir mything 4. cd mything 5. yt init 6. Paste some code in source/main.cpp 7. yt target bbc-microbit-gcc 8. yt…
I prepared this vagrant script to easily get it up and running in a virtual machine with just a single command and then accessing it through ssh: https://github.com/carlosperate/microbit-dev-env
Hopefully other people might find it useful.
Re: BBC Micro:bit computer now available to all for £13
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
respectfully, that's missing the point. The beauty of the BBC Micro is the stark hardware specification -- the limits are the point. That scarcity leads to different usage, different behavior, different learning patterns. If one wants to go poking around with modern languages, multi-tier applications, color-coding IDEs, etc. there is no shortage of modern computers available. But instead, if one wishes to learn the f…
> respectfully, that's missing the point. On the contrary, it seems you have missed my point, or at least, nothing that follows that statement directly contradicts it. Speaking of which, you state that the BBC micro:bit (the BBC Micro was a very different computer) is good for education, which I would certainly hope, since that's what it was designed for. However suggesting that teaching assembly language to 11 year…
scoot, I offer my apologies. You are correct -- I read too much into what you said (limitations on bluetooth due to RAM scarcity), and took off on a tangent.