Snake On A BBC Micro:bit

April 13, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield 35 Comments

The first of the BBC Micro Bits are slowly making their ways into hacker circulation, as is to be expected for any inexpensive educational gadget (see: Raspberry Pi). [Martin] was able to get his hands on one and created the “hello world” of LED displays: he created a playable game of snake that runs on this tiny board.

For those new to the scene, the Micro Bit is the latest in embedded ARM systems. It has a 23-pin connector for inputs and outputs, it has Bluetooth and USB connectivity, a wealth of sensors, and a 25-LED display. That’s small for a full display but it’s more than enough for [Martin]’s game of snake. He was able to create a hex file using the upyed tool from [ntoll] and upload it to the Micro Bit. Once he worked out all the kinks he went an additional step further and ported the game to Minecraft and the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT.

[Martin] has made all of the code available if you’re lucky enough to get your hands on one of these. Right now it seems that they are mostly in the hands of some UK teachers and students, but it’s only a matter of time before they become as ubiquitous as the Raspberry Pi or the original BBC Micro. It already runs python, so the sky’s the limit on these new boards.

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British Kids Finally Get Their Micro:Bits

March 22, 2016 by Jenny List 80 Comments

The little board that has at times seemed so plagued with delays as to become the Duke Nukem Forever of small computers has finally shipped. A million or so British seventh-grade schoolchildren and their teachers will today start receiving their free BBC micro:bits.

Announced early last year, the plan was to rekindle the learning of code in schools through handing out a powerful and easy to program small computer to the students. The hope is that it will recapture the spirit of the 1980s, when school computing meant programming Acorn’s BBC Micro rather than learning how to use Microsoft Word.

Sadly the project has been delayed multiple times, the original target of last October was missed, and a revised estimate from January suggested they might ship at half-term (about four weeks ago). With only a few days to go before the Easter school holidays the kids will have to try them out at home, but at least they’re arriving.
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BBC Micro:Bit Gets An App

February 21, 2016 by Jenny List 10 Comments

It’s a small, cheap, British single board computer, and nobody can get hold of them. Another Raspberry Pi Zero story, you might think, but no, this is about the other small cheap and difficult to find British SBC, the BBC micro:bit. Samsung UK have produced an app for the micro:bit that allows owners to write code on their Android phones, and upload it to their micro:bit via Bluetooth.

The micro:bit story has played out with agonising slowness over the last year, but it seems that there may now be light at the end of the tunnel. The idea is a good one: give a small but very capable single board computer to every Year 7 (about 12 years old) child, and watch them learn something more useful about computers than how to use a Windows application. It has echoes of the BBC Micro 8-bit computer for schools sponsored by the UK government in the 1980s, and the hope is that it will help reproduce the same technical literacy enjoyed by 1980s kids.

The plan was for the youngsters to receive their boards last October but the project as been plagued by a series of delays and the latest estimate from January was that the boards would reach the kids after the school half-term. In other words within the next couple of weeks, depending on which part of the UK the school is located in.

We recently had a brief opportunity here at Hackaday to examine a micro:bit in the wild. It is a capable little board in its own right, being at heart an mbed, however the recommended web-based micro:bit IDE and compiler differs from the more usual mbed toolchain. One thing that caught our attention in the demo we were given was the micro:bit’s use of USB to deploy code; since schools lock down computer hardware to the n’th degree we were concerned that the micro:bits might not be visible on school USB ports. Easy Bluetooth deployment through the Samsung app promises to bypass that barrier, which can only be a good thing.

We’ve been watching the micro:bit story here at Hackaday from the start, most recently we noted the arrival of Python on the platform. If it has a formative influence on the generation of developers and engineers you’ll be hiring in the mid-2020s then we expect it to feature in many future stories.

35 Million People Didn’t Notice When Zynq Took Over Their Radio

January 23, 2016 by James Hobson 39 Comments

What happens when part of a radio transmitting service listened to by over half the country needs to be replaced? That was a recent challenge for the BBC’s Research and Development team last year, and if you’re from the UK — you wouldn’t have noticed a single thing.

[Justin Mitchell] is a principle engineer in R&D at BBC, and just this past year had to transition the audio coding system installed in 1983 to new hardware due to failing circuit boards and obsolete components. The encoding is used to get audio from a central source to broadcasting towers all over the country. The team had to design and build a replacement module that would essentially replace an entire server rack of ancient hardware — and make it plug-and-play. Easy, right? Continue reading “35 Million People Didn’t Notice When Zynq Took Over Their Radio” →

Micro:bit — BBC Gets A Million Kids Into Embedded Dev

July 7, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 149 Comments

In the Early 1980s, the BBC launched a project to teach computer literacy to a generation of British schoolchildren. This project resulted in the BBC Micro, a very capable home computer that showed a generation exactly what a computer could do. These children then went home, turned on their ZX Spectrums, and became a generation of software engineers. Still, the BBC Micro is remembered fondly.

The computer revolution is long over, but today we suffer a sea change of embedded processors and microcontrollers. With Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, the BBC has decided it’s time to put the power of an ARM microcontroller into the hands of a million 11- and 12-year olds. The result is the Micro:bit. It’s a small microcontroller board with an ARM processor, an IMU, buttons, Bluetooth and a 5×5 LED array – exactly what you need if you’re teaching a million kids how to blink an LED.

Although the BBC has finalized the design for the Micro:bit, there are no specs at all. However, a few educated guesses can be made. The USB controller is provided by Freescale, who also provide the digital compass and magnetometer. Programming is done through a web-based, Arduino-like IDE with what appears to be a decent Micro:bit specific library. The board is also mbed compatible. Bluetooth, and apparently the ARM Cortex M0 core, is provided by a Nordic nRF51822. There are only three alligator clip-compatible I/Os, and its doubtful any student will be building anything that would be too complex for an entry level ARM. It’s also 3V logic; finally, the tyranny of 5V has fallen.

The Micro:bit is best seen as a tool that enables the relatively recent addition of a computer science curriculum in UK schools. There is now a requirement for seven-year-olds to understand algorithms and create simple programs. Previously computer education in the UK has consisted of PowerPoint. Now, secondary school students will be learning Boolean logic.

While the Micro:bit is utterly useless as a tool for doing real work, education is not real work. For blinking a few LEDs, having a device react to movement, playing with Bluetooth, and other lesser evils of electronics, the Micro:bit is great. Not everyone will become the digital technologists this initiative is trying to create, but for those who have an inclination towards semicolons and electrons, this is a great introduction to technology.

Retrotechtacular: The Early Days Of CGI

March 11, 2015 by Rick Osgood 39 Comments

We all know what Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) is nowadays. It’s almost impossible to get away from it in any television show or movie. It’s gotten so good, that sometimes it can be difficult to tell the difference between the real world and the computer generated world when they are mixed together on-screen. Of course, it wasn’t always like this. This 1982 clip from BBC’s Tomorrow’s World shows what the wonders of CGI were capable of in a simpler time.

In the earliest days of CGI, digital computers weren’t even really a thing. [John Whitney] was an American animator and is widely considered to be the father of computer animation. In the 1940’s, he and his brother [James] started to experiment with what they called “abstract animation”. They pieced together old analog computers and servos to make their own devices that were capable of controlling the motion of lights and lit objects. While this process may be a far cry from the CGI of today, it is still animation performed by a computer. One of [Whitney’s] best known works is the opening title sequence to [Alfred Hitchcock’s] 1958 film, Vertigo.

Later, in 1973, Westworld become the very first feature film to feature CGI. The film was a science fiction western-thriller about amusement park robots that become evil. The studio wanted footage of the robot’s “computer vision” but they would need an expert to get the job done right. They ultimately hired [John Whitney’s] son, [John Whitney Jr] to lead the project. The process first required color separating each frame of the 70mm film because [John Jr] did not have a color scanner. He then used a computer to digitally modify each image to create what we would now recognize as a “pixelated” effect. The computer processing took approximately eight hours for every ten seconds of footage. Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Early Days Of CGI” →

Vacuum Gloves For Climbing Buildings

July 25, 2009 by Zach Banks 22 Comments

spiderman

Suction is incredibly powerful and can be put to use in several different ways. [Jem Stansfield] built a set of vacuum gloves for a BBC TV series to show how powerful suction really is. He climbed up the side of a 100 foot building, yet had to rely on his safety line near the top. The video of his daring ascension after the jump.

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