Micro:bit developer community • Hacker News Board

Re: Micro:bit developer community

#31

Post by whiskers » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 8:05 PM UTC

curioussavage wrote: post #27

rb808 wrote: post #9

I see these are available to buy in the UK now (has singles from other retailers http://uk.farnell.com/bbc-microbit-reseller ). http://uk.farnell.com/bbc-microbit?CMP=AFC-AN-UK-ALL-473347 Anyone how to buy a single one in the US? My 8yo was going to get an arduino robot for Christmas but this might simpler to use I think.

I bought mine from Pimoroni. Took two weeks to get to California. I paid in bitcoin so I'm not sure what the exact cost was in dollars. I bought two more for other people. Much simpler for beginners. And they sell a coin cell add on board so your kid can carry it around and show people. Or put it on a lanyard.

I'm sorry the shipping took so long, usually standard shipping to the US arrives within a week (though we offer UPS next day services for extra cost).

Re: Micro:bit developer community

#32

Post by IshKebab » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 8:38 PM UTC

tonetheman wrote: post #21

I bought one. Programming it online and being able drag/drop a hex file onto the device makes it super simple and approachable. Very cool product.

That's how all mbed boards are programmed (one of the ways anyway). It's ok until you need a real IDE and then they don't have any great solutions.

Re: Micro:bit developer community

#33

Post by IshKebab » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 8:40 PM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #8

So this is not available in the US yet. And there is no link to a reseller directly from their site.

You can use any nRF51822 board, and there are a lot available. I'd probably get the official dev kit as it is pretty cheap and can be used to program bare nRF5x chips (it has a segger programmer on board).

Re: Micro:bit developer community

#34

Post by abchatra » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 10:18 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #25

abchatra wrote: post #18

We build editor for microbit (beta - https://pxt.microbit.org ). Code is open source as well( https://github.com/Microsoft/pxt ). Give us some feedback.

Can we agree that you seem to have one of the greatest jobs at Microsoft?

:-). Yes I do love it here. Thanks!

Re: Micro:bit developer community

#35

Post by itgoon » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

msh wrote: post #24

solaris999 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate how much having something tactile, with buttons and LEDs, can really shift how younger students perceive learning. I volunteer teach a group of 8/9 year olds an intro to programming class and the difference between teaching them Python using CLI-esque tools and making things light up on the micro:bit is astounding.

Maybe you are right, I am just thinking it would be harder to to get a program to do something interesting.

I think you have it backwards. It might be easier to print "hello world", but that's not interesting.

Blinking an LED? That's actually interesting. You can show your friends. You can put it in another toy. A child can do a lot with a blinking LED.

Re: Micro:bit developer community

#36

Post by m_t » Thu, Oct 20, 2016, 9:57 AM UTC

abchatra wrote: post #18

We build editor for microbit (beta - https://pxt.microbit.org ). Code is open source as well( https://github.com/Microsoft/pxt ). Give us some feedback.

This is wonderfully fun.

Re: Micro:bit developer community

#37

Post by jonnyaustin » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 4:26 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #32

tonetheman wrote: post #21

I bought one. Programming it online and being able drag/drop a hex file onto the device makes it super simple and approachable. Very cool product.

That's how all mbed boards are programmed (one of the ways anyway). It's ok until you need a real IDE and then they don't have any great solutions.

That used to be the case, but have a look at the new mbed exporters - you can now export to: uVision 4 uVision 5 DS-5 LPCXpresso IAR Embedded Workbench CooCox CoIDE Kinetis Design Studio Simplicity Studio Atmel Studio SW4STM32 Systems Workbench e2studio Emblocks

(taken from this recent post https://developer.mbed.org/blog/entry/Fixed-exporters-in-the... )

Which is a healthy start! There's an open source project for export to things that mbed uses: https://github.com/project-generator/project_generator

full disclosure: I am part of the mbed team

Re: Micro:bit developer community

#38

Post by IshKebab » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 10:36 PM UTC

jonnyaustin wrote: post #37

IshKebab wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how all mbed boards are programmed (one of the ways anyway). It's ok until you need a real IDE and then they don't have any great solutions.

That used to be the case, but have a look at the new mbed exporters - you can now export to: uVision 4 uVision 5 DS-5 LPCXpresso IAR Embedded Workbench CooCox CoIDE Kinetis Design Studio Simplicity Studio Atmel Studio SW4STM32 Systems Workbench e2studio Emblocks (taken from this recent post https://developer.mbed.org/blog/entry/Fixed-exporters-in-the... ) Which is a healthy start! There's an open source project for e…

While that is certainly good, people using Arduino now aren't going to spend £1k on IAR or whatever. Emblocks always seemed like a good option but as far as I can tell it isn't developed any more.

Qt Creator, Visual Studio Code, KDevelop etc. would be more welcome. I did write an exporter for Qt Creator actually a year or two ago and abandoned it after the move to Yotta. Guess it is time to revive it!

Btw where is the mbed team based?