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Comment by david-given | Hacker News Reader

Can you talk about the hardware at all? Technical details seem really hard to come by.

e.g. Wikipedia suggests it's got two processors. That's application processor and a USB I/O processor, right? Which handles mass storage mode and bootstrapping the applications processor? Does it also provide a debugging interface, and can it be programmed? Have they exposed any JTAG pins for the applications processor? Are you required to use their toolchain or can I just womp something up with gcc and deploy it?

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I'm under NDA, but I believe we can talk about things that have already been disclosed.

If you do a google image search for large micro:bit images, you'll see there's a Nordic NRF51822 chip (Which is an ARM Cortex M0, with BLE), and a Kinetis ARM chip connected to USB. It's running an mbed-compatible bootloader that appears as a USB mass storage device. You just copy hex files onto it and it programs the NRF51822.

Does that google image show any markings on "Kinetis ARM chip"?

Ok, Wikipedia says it's KL26Z, also 16K RAM, good. I was concerned there may be some cheating with higher RAM available on it. But nope, folks now will really need to optimize stuff to do something useful in 16K ;-).

Unfortunately, I can't reveal any more about the hardware than is already in the public domain already. :-(

Happy to talk about MicroPython.

Sorry.

Is it a quantum computer? I am curious about the secret behind the device.

Oh, well, it was worth a try!

What was the porting experience like? I have a non-ARM low-end microprocessor it might be interesting to port MicroPython to.

Can you talk about what kind of documentation will be released? Data sheet? programmer's manual? anything at all about the hardware?

Yes, you'll get all the digital assets needed to be able to re-create the hardware yourself as well as access to the software.

Obviously, we'll be documenting the MicroPython implementation. Other partners will do their own thing.

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