microbit | A Rust crate for BBC micro : bit development

Using this basic example code from microbit, blinking heart, I tried to change the delay of blinking with the pause argument. However, the minimum actual blinking frequency is around 500ms, no matter what value i put.

Do you know why, and how I can achieve much faster blinking with led patterns (like show_icon or show_leds function).

I am currently teaching a remote middle school summer camp next year that involves microcontroller programming. I’ve chosen to avoid Arduino microcontrollers for the camp and use a MicroPython compatible microcontroller instead. One microcontroller that I am interested in using is the Lolin V 1.1.0 with an ESP-Wroom-32 chip since it is cheap and reliable.

One downside that I’ve noticed with this MCU is that a VCP driver needs to be installed in order to establish a USB to UART connection (It contains a CP210x chip). I’m not too sure how many Operating systems have a VCP driver installed by default. However, I tested to see if the microcontroller was able to be registered on three of my different laptops. On two MacBook airs, my computer was successfully able to locate the MCU without a virtual driver installed. Similarly, I used a Windows computer and a connection was able to be established after 10 minutes (Not sure why it took this long). Finally, I tried it on my friend’s European MacBook and his computer wasn’t able to locate the microcontroller until I installed the driver.

I’m expecting that the camp would be ~300 students and I don’t want anyone to not be able to connect with their Microcontrollers and don’t want to include the installation of the driver since it can be tedious.

Does anyone know how big companies that teach Microcontroller programming to beginners such as MicroBit, Raspberry Pi, or Arduino deal with this problem? How do they ensure that the microcontrollers are read by the computer without having to have students to go through the tedious process of installing a driver?

What percentage of Operating systems have a CP210x VCP driver already installed?

Are there any microcontrollers that don’t require a USB to UART driver installation altogether?

Thanks! Ryan

I'm writing a module for an I2C temperature sensor (TMP117) with cross-compatability being a priority.

The MicroPython implementation is different on BBC Micro:bit and Raspberry Pi Pico - an important difference is how the I2C driver is implemented:

• Pico uses the machine class to drive i2c: i2c.writeto
• Micro:bit has already defined i2c.write (bundled with from microbit import *) docs

This simple difference in naming is really all that affects compatability!

So far I have shoehorned a working solution so my module tmp117.py is usable on both platforms. In tmp117.py, when the sensor class is initialised it checks the sysname and declares function pointers self.i2cWrite and self.i2cRead that are assigned the hardware-appropriate definition.

However, I'm quite new to Python and imagine I may have committed many atrocities in doing so by eg. mishandling namespaces or chewing up memory with inappropriate imports. Can anybody comment if this method is appropriate? In terms of scalability, needless imports, namespaces etc.

main.py

I am trying to set up a very simple example using the ada I2C library with the MCP23017 IO expander on the micro:bit (V1.5) but I can't figure it out. For now, all I want to do is turn on an LED that is connected to a GPIOA pin. I have it working in python with the following:

I followed the adacore tutorial on displaying scrolling text (https://blog.adacore.com/ada-for-microbit-part-1-getting-started) but can't get it working on my microbit.

Maybe my microbit is a more recent version that is not yet supported? The reason I suspect this is that my board id (9904) was not supported the first time I tried to flash to the board. I used the fix described here: Unable to get the Ada scrolling text demo working on the microbit on GNAT 2019 community edition and added the following line in board_ids.py:

I would like to ask some help from you. I'm trying to connect a distance sensor to my microbit but when I use the command "time_pulse_us" it always gives -2 or -1. I read the documentation, I understand the meaning of those numbers but I think there's a problem with the command or probably I'm using it the wrong way.

In that regard, I wrote a simple snippet to test the command. Could you tell me what's wrong with it?

My son and I are trying to implement one of the fun-science.org microbit tutorials - building a "tug of war" game. Essentially, 10 presses on button A moves the sprite closer to that button and the same applies on button B. When you hit the edge of the screen, music plays and a message is scrolled on the screen before the game restarts.

We've got it fully working, but once the game has been won, it doesn't seem to reset properly. It works fine on the simulator, but not on the physical device (a microbit 2).

Once the game is won, the behaviour is erratic. It usually puts the sprite back in the middle, sometimes not, but frequently, one button doesn't work in the next game. Occasionally both stop working. In every situation, a restart fixes things.

Is there something wrong with the code? I've wondered whether the music / message is corrupting something and I need to put a wait in for it to complete. I've re-downloaded the hex file and re-flashed the microbit several times, so I think I've eliminated a corrupt code file.

Javascript version of code shown below, but it was actually built in blockly using the Microsoft MakeCode tool.

this is how we get the device name using blocks But I need to find the way to code in micropython to find the same.

from microbit import * while True: basic.show_string(control.device_name())

This throws an error!

I am playing around with bbc:microbit using bluetooth web api to access the microbit service data (button event, led, magnetometer, ...).

It looks like the light sensor information are not accessible from the javascript API. From the microbit documentation, light sensing are accessible from the led service, but it looks like the lib is missing them.