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Comment by matthewwarren | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about that, of course it is limited compared to the Raspberry Pi.

But, have you ever watched a kid use one and within 5 mins be able to have their name scroll across the screen or make a simple Paper/Scissors/Stone game using the accelerometer? They get pretty excited about it!

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It has the advantage as well as coming with buttons and lights (as well as accelerometer, compass, light sensor, temperature sensor, bluetooth), so the time between 'open package' and see your code doing something is much smaller.

At £15 for one with a battery pack, cables, tutorials, and all that, it sounds great.

And apparently has a different radio too, to connect to other micro:bits? Multiplayer rock paper scissors: https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/rps-teams

I'll happily trade not having loads of ram for something a kid (or a big kid myself :) ) can pick up and just make something fun in almost no time.

As I understand it it's using the bluetooth chip, but as it's actually a Software Defined Radio, they wrote simpler software that doesn't take up half the ram of the computer.

A few weeks ago I saw dozens of Singaporean kids showing off projects they'd built with the Micro:bit. They learned a good deal, had been very creative, and were clearly interested in learning more. Sounds like a good outcome.

I've heard this before, but how can the appeal last longer than a few minutes? Seriously, a computer is about potential but the possibilities are so incredibly limited with this device that it's hard to see where to go after a few blinking lights. That's just not exciting.

For an example of what the new BBC project should have been, look up littlebits - now there's potential and open ended creative possibility.

A few blinking lights and that's the total potential? Meh.

Well you can wire it up to eternal devices easily enough.

Also take a look at some of the ideas on this page, http://microbit.org/ideas/projects/.

(thanks for the info about 'littlebits', I'd not heard about that, taking a look now)

Multiplayer rock paper scissors with radio communication based on shaking them?

https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/rps-teams

Add on some motors and make a robot that hides from the light?

Make a robot that can follow a path, or that drives based on true compass directions.

Make a hide and seek with your microbit reporting hot/cold based on signal strength to other microbits? https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/hot-or-cold

Display the temperature?

Send messages to people?

Add on any other sensors?

Connect to your phone and do something else (app driven robot maybe)

Firefly synchronisation https://makecode.microbit.org/projects/fireflies

There's loads on that page and really you've got sensors and can control other things, and do distributed communication. There's lots of things you can do with a low powered processor, and it's not locked down to a few options.

Edit - I've just found out you can play sounds with it too.

Edit 2 - I'm now actually quite excited about this. I'm going to go out and buy one now.

Sorry but for a modern kid, the sort of projects you are talking about sound like the sort of projects that an adult thinks kids would love, not what kids would actually love, which is screens, color, games, robotics and interaction.

It was a huge mistake not to ship this with a video port.

> It was a huge mistake not to ship this with a video port.

Looking at what I see happening with the Raspberry Pi, I don't agree with that assertion. It's not been very important for making cooler projects with kids, it only made coding on it easier since it didn't come with a nice remote environment and you thus could use the Linux desktop on the Pi for coding. (It also opens up use cases like "media center", but those are not very relevant for education).

Kids find going to hardware like the microbit/Pi/Arduino interesting because it is breaking out of the usual screen(+keyboard in case of a PC) environment, and you can do

> games, robotics and interaction

that's not limited to the screen. And nothing stops you to combine both, have the microbit talk to a PC/phone.

> a modern kid

I think it's a mistake to assume modern kids need high powered things to be interesting. I've been at a maker faire where the kids were amazed at seeing an old broadcast camera hooked up to a TV. All it was doing was recording and playing things back, but they liked it. I'm sure lots of them even had phones which would do the same thing but with higher quality.

The local science museum always hads kids running about in the discovery section playing with things like pulleys and shouting into the long tube that creates a delay, or the glasses that turn things upside down.

Kids still play with lego which has absolutely no moving parts or complex interaction.

I'm sure if you start by telling kids it'll be boring they'll hate it. Otherwise kids seem to be able to have fun with anything as complex as a cardbox box upwards.

> games, robotics and interaction.

I mean, several of my examples are games, robots and involve interaction.

I can easily see how to use two of these to make a robot wars robot, one for the controller (steer with tilting and a button for "go" and a button for "fire") and one for the robot. Don't tell me kids wouldn't be interested in making fighting robots.

> It was a huge mistake not to ship this with a video port.

I think it'd be a huge mistake to try and make something like the rPi. That already exists if you want to do stuff connected to a screen with a full OS and internet access.

I doubt it would have fitted into the budget for production either, given that these needed to be given to every year 7 in the country.

I think you're trying to make it boring, and have fun with that, I'm going to go and make a robot. Or maybe finally build the sensor to see how far my degu runs in a day on his wheel.

Based on my experience the compass is the only part of these I haven't liked. I haven't successfully managed to accurately calibrate one yet, which has really put a crimp on how that feature is used.

There's seems to be a known bug related to this, see https://github.com/lancaster-university/microbit-dal/issues/....

Really useful to know, thanks.

Littlebits is considerably more expensive than the micro:bit.

Yes but the BBC would have been better not to commission a new computer, but to design a standard for connecting tiny cheap computing devices together and let industry build interesting BBC compatible things that could be hooked together, expanded, interfaced, with electronics, vision, sound, robotics, movement etc etc

You can hook up lots of the popular kit that works with Arduino to Microbits quite easily (servos, steppers, ultrasonic sensors, extended LED arrays, humidity and moisture sensors). Most of it will work with block code too.

That's great - unless you mission is to quickly get cheap devices into classrooms

Yeah, I suspect the BBC had a very specific remit and they would've been in trouble if they'd got into too much competition with existing manufacturers/companies.

They are very much a publicly funded corporation, so everything they do has to fit with that.

It's not exactly a new computer, it's using ARM's mbed system, so that's a standard real world IoT platform, not a toy.

You can drive larger displays https://github.com/carlosperate/awesome-microbit

Plus don't think it's the only computer they'll have, it's an IoT computer, it's supposed to not have a video out.

I like that it's all in one, you can program it in 5 mins with a browser, and yet connects to real IO the same way real embedded computers do, you have to get a bit messy, you know it's not a toy.

I've been teaching using these for the last 9 months, using them for an introductory and tactile programming environment (being able to easily switch from block code to Python when they get the concepts is great), learning about how computers use a variety of external sensors, introducing some of the structure of wireless networking, congestion and attenuation and more.

And that's without using any of the pins to hook up external gear. My kids have just started hooking up continuous servos and creating remote control buggies with them, learning about protocols in the meantime.

They're probably one of the best pieces of kit I've used in 13 years of teaching (and cheap to boot).

But feel free to keep rubbishing them, that's your prerogative :)

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