BBC micro:bit initiative – Design to Production in Practice

RE: BBC micro:bit initiative – Design to Production in Practice

Workshopshed — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 16:14:29 GMT

I was thinking about some kind of demo of the compass and I/O and lights mimicking a "South Facing Chariot" but I looked at the deadlines and they are just a bit tight for me.

RE: BBC micro:bit initiative – Design to Production in Practice

element14Dave — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 15:19:06 GMT

Interested in the micro:bit? We're giving away 5 to be RoadTested! Click here to apply.

RE: BBC micro:bit initiative – Design to Production in Practice

Workshopshed — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 09:03:49 GMT

The IET education team will be working on this exciting project to produce a range of teaching resources, events and teacher CPD to promote this coding device and encourage its use both in school and at home as the students will be able to keep their coding device and take it home to carry on the learning with their parents. The events are to include a series of off-timetable, STEM challenge days that will include some training on the devices as well as encourage creativity, team working, problem solving and the application of the technology to real-life situations.

IET partners with BBC for Make it Digital Campaign

RE: BBC micro:bit initiative – Design to Production in Practice

balearicdynamics — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 06:14:02 GMT

I know BBC by years and I have always appreciated their general approach to the electronics oriented to all. When the world of "Makers" and all the recently born words that are so liked by the last generations. By one side seeing this announcement it's a great and welcome surprise but seeing the brand from where it originated ... It's like something that had to be expected. Really a great idea very well done and perfectly oriented to the specific target.

If I have the option to put the hands on one of these one of the better things - as far as I remember what I was doing when I was 12 - is the creation of a set of simple applications for play-hacking games in a very simple way with the small board. And the same as some nice Android app games for gaming interaction with the board.

Enrico

RE: BBC micro:bit initiative – Design to Production in Practice

Former Member — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 03:13:06 GMT

Thanks for this, Richard! The micro:bit looks very exciting and, as a secondary computing teacher, I can't wait to start using them with my classes in October. It's really interesting to hear the work element14 have been doing to get this to us in such a short time frame!

I'm really interested in adding hardware to the micro:bit and I was trying to track down a suitable edge connector on farnell.co.uk ... it looks like it's a 2 x 40 way connector with a pitch of 1.27mm and no key but the nearest I can find is one with a key and no end pieces. Do you have a suitable connector or will there be one in the future? Thanks!

RE: BBC micro:bit initiative – Design to Production in Practice

shabaz — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 00:17:18 GMT

Thanks so much for the behind-the-scenes information on this project and the decisions made. What a fantastic, collaborative project. I love that ARM is also a partner, so that presumably technology

from the excellent mbed platform can be reused and incorporated into the portal that children will use. It removes all the complexity of needing locally installed IDEs, custom drivers and firmware upload tools.

The built-in Bluetooth LE means that there are potentially a _lot_ of opportunities from using mobile phones to connect to cloud applications, to perhaps OTA (over-the-air) software updates. The USB and

battery connector options look very flexible. Indeed, maybe it could even be powered from a mobile phone with USB OTG functionality since I can't imagine the device consuming much power.

The board is also very innovative because it appears a lot of thought went into designing it to function without an enclosure - so no protruding DIL headers etc., and there is out-of-the-box thinking with the descriptive

silkscreen of functional building-blocks, rather than traditional component references on circuit boards, which would be of little use without a schematic.

The removed copper labelling of the ports on the edge connector is also very cool - means that the labelling will never scratch off when croc clips (which every school physics lab should have) are used.

I hope we continue to get further insight over time into the key decisions made by Element14 for this project. For example it can be seen that there are test points (for pogo pins, etc) on the board - perhaps

this is for initial firmware upload (e.g. via JTAG), or for future batch programmers for use in the classroom for rapidly setting the board to default settings.

Anyway, it is great to see this project evolve so much since the initial announcement back in March.