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Comment by SamBam | Hacker News Reader

This looks great. In seems from a rough glance at the feature set that there are plenty of boards that do more for not much more money, but my guess is that this is designed mostly for the beginner/educational set, where everything can be nicely standardized and not the Cambrian Explosion of the *duino boards. Is that about right?

Speaking of education, does anyone have a favorite mechanical device (toy car, robot, etc) that is compatible with a microcontroller that can be used for teaching little kids? (Month 10 of learning-from-home dragging on here...)

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the PIO part as far as I know does not have a match in anything else in that market segment. I was sceptical too at first, but it seems like this actually does add something new to the market. More examples will be around, but e.g. the first demo going around driving two DVI screens is already pretty neat for what's possible, and other devices would struggle with.

Do you have a link to the demo with two DVI screens?

https://github.com/Wren6991/picodvi

PIO feels like a lateral progression from the arm+fpga socs that have been floating around for awhile. So you could already get socs with even more powerful configurable logic behind their IO. Most FPGAs support partial reconfiguration so they can be reconfigured dynamically as well.

PIO is still pretty cool from an ease of use and cost perspective though.

Have a look at kits for BBC Micro:Bit.

EG, this one gives you a nice breakout board and a few sensors and switches. It also gives you an instruction book. You'll also need to buy the actual Micro:Bit too. This kit has a website for more projects here: https://tinkercademy.com/microbit/

You program the micro:bit in MakeCode in a webbrowser. That also has an emulated device so you can see what it's like without having the actual board.

And you can program the Micro:Bit with Python.

It looks spendy, and it is, but the colour-coding of the cables and the keyways of the sensor PCBs make it friendly for children.

There are lots of kits for micro:bit https://www.elecfreaks.com/micro-bit/kits.html

You may want to wait for Version 2 to be released. https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-95670/l/introdu...

> You may want to wait for Version 2 to be released

You can already buy it from Ali Express.

"but my guess is that this is designed mostly for the beginner/educational set, where everything can be nicely standardized and not the Cambrian Explosion of the *duino boards"

That was my take on it. I first saw it and thought of my adurino nanos. Then reading the specs, I wondered why not use an ESP32 with wireless etc. I think they are only $3 more. Standardization was all I was left with.

It's also a nice and relatively straightforward first step into custom silicon, which is probably going to turn out to be quite an important strategic move for them.

I wouldn't have thought so, but I guess it could. I thought their whole point was to use existing chips that were low cost to promote education. Jumping into custom chips seems like an odd move for that, unless they want to monetize.

They've got scale now. I think that's the difference.

Seems to be clocked a lot higher than the lower cost arduino models. And has a little more memory.

So it might be worse suited to battery-powered applications, unless you do some power managment.

Not that I know what you would necessarily do with more of that compute.

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