BBC micro: bit

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Rear of the BBC micro: bit

The BBC micro: bit is an inexpensive single board computer that was introduced by the British Broadcasting Corporation in July 2015. The primary goal of the project is to improve school education in the field of information technology . The device is implemented as a single-board computer based on an ARM microcontroller and can be programmed using various web-based development environments.

background

The BBC micro: bit was developed by the BBC from 2014 and presented in July 2015. After delivery was originally supposed to start in October of the same year, the device has been available since March 2016 after delays. Since then, with the help of various partners, more than a million devices have been distributed free of charge to 11-12 year old students in the UK . There are also similar initiatives in the Netherlands and Iceland .

The name of the device refers to the home computer BBC Micro made by the British computer company Acorn , which was available in the 1980s and was sponsored by the BBC for educational purposes. Responsibility for the further dissemination and support of the BBC micro: bit, which is also available to private individuals through various electronics retailers, was transferred to a non-profit foundation called the Micro: bit Educational Foundation from October 2016 .

With the Calliope mini , a comparable, significantly more expensive computer that was developed in Germany has been available from Cornelsen Verlag since August 2017 . Due to the different pin assignment, this is largely code-compatible with the BBC micro: bit, but in addition to its hardware equipment it has other components such as a loudspeaker , a microphone and an RGB light-emitting diode .

The price of the BBC micro: bit for private users is around £ 11–13 or around € 16–30 (as of August 2017) , depending on the provider .

hardware

All relevant hardware components are available on the BBC micro: bit in the form of an embedded system . On a populated on both sides printed circuit board having the dimensions of 43 mm × 52 mm is located as a processor , a microcontroller of the type ARM Cortex-M0 ( Nordic nRF51822) with 32-bit and 16 MHz clock frequency , including 256 KB flash memory and 16 KB static RAM as well as support for the radio technology Bluetooth Low Energy .

Two buttons for programmable user interactions and 25 light-emitting diodes arranged in a 5 × 5 grid are available for data input and output . A further button is used to reset or restart the system. The device is also equipped with an acceleration sensor ( NXP / Freescale MMA8652) and a magnetometer (NXP / Freescale MAG3110).

In addition, there is a circuit board connector strip with GPIO connections , three of which allow contact using alligator clips or banana plugs . Various of these connections can be used as analog inputs via an analog-digital converter as well as for communication via I²C or SPI . Two further contacts (3V / GND) accessible via crocodile clips or banana plugs provide a power supply for external hardware.

The BBC micro: bit is supplied with power via a socket for a battery holder , via the 3V / GND contacts on the connector strip or via a micro-USB connection , which is also used for data transmission.

software

The BBC micro: bit is programmed using various development environments that support JavaScript and MicroPython , among other things , and partially enable block-based visual software development , for example Open Roberta from the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems . The development environments run as web applications in a web browser .

After connecting to a PC via the USB interface, the BBC micro: bit is managed as a USB data carrier to which the programs are transferred. These start immediately after switching on or restarting the system.

literature

Web links

Commons : BBC Micro Bit  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikiversity: BBC micro: bit  - course materials