RoadTest: micro:bit wear:it Development Kit
Author: billmartensson
Creation date:
Evaluation Type: Development Boards & Tools
Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True
What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?:
What were the biggest problems encountered?:
Detailed Review:
Simply put the micro_bit wear:it is a strap to easily wear a micro:bit on the wrist with an attached battery.
The wear:it shines when used considering it will be on an arm.
Using the radio to signal another micro:bot is great to just use the wear:it as a controller.
Using the accelerometer events is natural to use arm movements to control.
The micro:bit is a powerful board for education. It's very easy to use with the drag/drop programming interface on the web.
I enlisted the help of my eight year old daughter. Given that the micro:bit is mainly an educational product I thought it would be a good idea to get input from a younger person.
The product
The wear:it comes with two different straps and the holder. The holder holds the micro:bit and has a battery to power the device. The A/B buttons are easily accessible. The 0/1/2 ports are exposed for easy clipping on.
Projects
We tried out many things with the wear:it. These are two projects that was tried.
Super hero arm
The micro:bit has a built in accelerometer which can be used to detect rotation. We attached a LED light to a glove. Then connected with short wire using clips to the port on the micro:bit.
We dragged in actions for different rotations of the micro:bit, that is different rotations of the arm.
One action was to point the hand down, that is micro:bit left side up. That "loaded" the arm. That is set a variable.
Then move hand up. When the arm was rotated right the arm would "fire" that is light the LED. if the variable was set.
To fire again the arm had to point down again.
Can be varied quite a lot with cooler lights.
Music arm
Like in the previous project we used the accelerometer events.
We connected a simple speaker with clips to the 0 port.
Then we assigned different tones to different rotations. Left up, meaning point hand down, one tone. Right up, meaning pointing hand up, one tone. And so on.
Then we could play tones to waving the hand around.
Notify my mood
The micro:bit has a build in radio for easy sending messages to other micro:bits.
We used one micro:bit in the wear:it. Here my daughter could press the A or B buttons. When she pressed A her micro:bit display would show a happy face and send a "A" using the radio. Press B would show sad face and send "B".
We had a different micro:bit listening for "A" and "B". That micro:bit had the speaker connected.
On a "A" radio signal it would show the happy face on the display and play a happy tune.
On a "B" radio signal it would show the sad face on the display and play a sad tune.
This way she could signal how she felt at a party.
