Wolfram Donat - Getting Started with the micro:bit: Coding and Making with the BBC’s Open Development Board

Copyright 2017 Wolfram Donat

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August 2017: First Edition

Revision History for the First Edition

2017-08-08 First Release

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This book is dedicated to Becky and Reed, who put up with a husband and father who disappears into the workshop or office for extended periods of time on a fairly regular basis. On a related note, they also deal with a number of screwy creations flowing out of the aforementioned workshop.

Patrick is an awesome editor who not only makes sure that I mean what I say and I say what I mean, but is also fun to work with. Bob checks that stuff works the way I say it does. Liz catches all the last-minute errors and makes sure that the end product of our collaboration looks as great as it does.

And last but not least, Oliver helps to make sure the office door remains in working order, Chloe ensures that all mobile creations are capable of evasive maneuvers, and Smudge both gives and receives emotional support.

I couldn't do it without you guys.

Wolfram Donat is an engineer, a writer, and a maker who has written books on subjects ranging from home-built animatronics to Windows XP to using the Raspberry Pi in your projects. His varied interests include robotics, embedded systems, autonomous underwater vehicles, computer vision, and the Internet of Things.

He received his degree in computer engineering from the University of Alaska, Anchorage and has received funding from NASA for work on autonomous submersibles. He currently lives in Southern California with his wife, son, and a small menagerie.

I f youve been paying attention to news in the world of technology, you may have noticed that there seems to be an astonishing number of single-board computers (SBCs) hitting the market lately. In a wave of devices that may have started with the Raspberry Pi, there are now dozens of small, powerful devices, ranging in price from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars. The Pi Zero, the Raspberry Pi Foundations lowest-cost board, uses a small, 1 GHz, single-core ARM chip and costs about five dollars. On the other end of the spectrum, the NVIDIA Jetson TK1 includes both an ARM A57 quad-core chip and a 256-core Maxwell GPU and will cost you about six hundred dollars. It is, however, still considered a single-board computer. Kickstarter is full of new SBCs, some successful, some not.

At the same time as the release of all of these surprisingly powerful small computers, various technology companies have been quietly releasing a flood of even smaller, lower-power chips and devices in the background. These boards are powered by a variety of processors, from ARM CPUs to smaller microcontrollers like the Atmega 328, and they are usually designed mainly for one purpose: performing one or more simple tasks and then interfacing with the Internet of Things (IoT).

What is the Internet of Things? For the full story behind the IoT, check out the accompanying sidebar. The short version is that the IoT is a worldwide web of small, low-power devices that are able to communicate with other devicesboth IoT devices and more full-featured machines such as smartphones and computersvia the Internet and other smaller networks. These devices are meant to connect everything, from your home thermostat to your refrigerator to your toaster to your keychain, and allow them to communicate via a network. They must necessarily subsist on almost no power (theres no room for big, bulky batteries in your keychain) and thus must also be sort of stupid, CPU-wise. The vast majority of them dont need to be particularly powerful, though many times their main function is simply to collect data and relay it to a more powerful computer, smartphone, or tablet, or perform a simple task in response to a simple command from another device.