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Comment by JBorrow | Hacker News Reader

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.

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