Submitted by The design for the Micro Bit, the sequel to the venerable BBC Micro, has been finalized, and will be given to every 11- and 12-year-old British child in October. BBC Learning head Sinead Rocks said: “The BBC Micro Bit is all about young people learning to express themselves digitally. As the Micro Bit is able to connect to everything from mobile phones to plant pots and Raspberry Pis, this could be for the internet-of-things what the BBC Micro was to the British gaming industry.” The Micro Bit’s web site confirms it will include an ARM Cortex M0 process, bluetooth, motion sensors and a built in compass.
A CM0 could be very limited reducing the fun to zero (16k ROM/4K RAM).
But from other sources speaking about a Freescale CM0 with Bluetooth it seems to be a KW30Z which has 160k Flash and 64K RAM. So a lot of space to even store Lua on it.
Actually it would be like in the old days, specially with so small Assembly instruction set.
I had lots of fun with Z80.
Right. But when I wrote in an German forum, that it is great that English pupils will now have to learn Assembly I got only blames.
Big difference: Now they develop on the PC and have to download it. No self-hosted systems anymore
The lack of display connection will ultimately kill this. I fiddled with the Micro and similar systems to see what I had developed and to play games on it (if im honest the main reason i kept going back)
a few LEDs vs an iPhone, i know which will capture the attention.
My feeling is they should have expanded on the Pi. Make it so it can play video or a simple game and people will want to use it. Teachers will find it hard to inspire kids with this…
I think the idea is to have a very simple and very cheap device that can be programmed through a full computer and run stand alone, i.e., a microcontroller. Just a basic building block.
In that sense, I think the micro:bit and the Raspberry Pi don’t compete but complement each other as they have different albeit slightly overlapping objectives. The RPi is oriented to both serve as a microcontroller platform but also as a standalone software development learning platform, which the micro:bit isn’t.
If you were to add a magnetometer, a simple LED array and some buttons to the RPi, it would not only add to cost but also introduce features that might no be interesting or even necessary to some (this also applies to BeagleBoard and to less extent to Arduino).
The micro:bit is a simple way to have it all integrated, standardized and actually quite versatile. I see other uses as a microcontroller platform beyond education, and I would like actually to buy at least one. A iniciative like OLPC’s buy two, offer one would be quite appealing.
Edited 2015-07-10 00:15 UTC
I concur – this Micro:Bit appears to serve a different purpose than the Raspberry Pi – although they complement each other.
The Micro:Bit will likely be a building block for some very basic interfacing with the simplistic LEDs display as a learning tool. The Pi is can be use as the brain behind fairly sophisticated DYI devices while still remaining a learning tool