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Comment by newaccoutnas | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic to see how far micro:bit has come, I was working with the engineer in R&D at the beeb at the time who came up with the idea. Fondly remember testing on the 5th floor lab, checking thermal properties of the prototypes so they didn't burn little fingers :) Hopefully it's 'sparked' a good interest in computers and electronics in curious minds (old and young)

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Our five year old daughter has one and absolutely loves it. Given her age, she is mostly at the 'show my drawings when a button is pressed'-stage. But she is having a lot of fun and is proud of the tiny programs that she made.

Thanks to you and your colleague(s) for this fun little computer!

I use them both at my school (7-12) and at the Coder Dojo I mentor at (mostly kids years 4-7-ish) and they are an absolute hit.

I've been having a blast looking at different concepts and projects which I can use when teaching Digital Technologies (the Australian learning area for CompSci types of ideas).

Personally as a teacher they've also done a world of good for me in learning about the basics of electronics and getting a better understanding of embedded programming (had some fun optimising MicroPython code to do what I want).

Some of the projects I've built with them (some for myself and some for teaching): - https://headtilt.me/dowsing-for-radio/ - https://headtilt.me/microbit-haunted-house/ - https://headtilt.me/designing-a-microbit-robot/

And a bit about some of the common components I use with them: https://headtilt.me/year-8-microbit-robotics/

I was directly involved in this project.

For the record, the micro:bit was originally based upon the CodeBug (http://www.codebug.org.uk/) by Andrew Robinson, who definitely deserves a mention in this story.

I, too, share your hope that it has "Sparked" curious minds (old and young). ;-)

I'd presume these things run at mA of power? Why would there be concerns to it getting hot?

Because kids do things like connecting VCC and ground, or drawing too much power from microcontroller pins, etc.

(I guess)

Voltage regulators usually have a short circuit protection circuit though.

They don't have polarity protection.

That's a good point. However, many regulators get hot with high loads. Also, the short circuit projection of some regulators is to burn out. Given all these problems and the relative carelessness of kids, I can see why they would dig through spec sheets and would measure temperature under various conditions.

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