BBC MicroBit
Overview
The Micro Bit (also referred to as BBC Micro Bit, stylized as micro:bit) is an ARM-based embedded system designed by the BBC for use in computer education in the UK.
The board is 4 cm × 5 cm and has an ARM Cortex-M0 processor, accelerometer and magnetometer sensors, Bluetooth and USB connectivity, a display consisting of 25 LEDs, two programmable buttons, and can be powered by either USB or an external battery pack. The device inputs and outputs are through five ring connectors that are part of the 23-pin edge connector.
NVIC
RTC
UART
GPIO
FLASH
RADIO (Bluetooth Low Energy)
Fig. 68 BBC Micro Bit (Credit: http://microbit.org/)
More information about the board can be found at the microbit website 1.
Hardware
The micro:bit has the following physical features:
25 individually-programmable LEDs
2 programmable buttons
Physical connection pins
Light and temperature sensors
Motion sensors (accelerometer and compass)
Wireless Communication, via Radio and Bluetooth
USB interface
Supported Features
The bbc_microbit board configuration supports the following nRF51 hardware features:
Interface |
Controller |
Driver/Component |
|---|---|---|
NVIC |
on-chip |
nested vectored interrupt controller |
RTC |
on-chip |
system clock |
UART |
on-chip |
serial port |
GPIO |
on-chip |
gpio |
FLASH |
on-chip |
flash |
RADIO |
on-chip |
Bluetooth |
Programming and Debugging
Flashing
Build and flash applications as usual (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details).
Here is an example for the Hello World application.
First, run your favorite terminal program to listen for output.
$ minicom -D <tty_device> -b 115200
Replace <tty_device> with the port where the board nRF51 DK
can be found. For example, under Linux, /dev/ttyACM0.
Then build and flash the application in the usual way.
# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b bbc_microbit samples/hello_world
west flash