ComputersLinuxmicro:bitProgrammingRaspberryPi

Programming the BBC Micro:Bit using a Raspberry Pi 2

The BBC Micro:Bit will be going out to school children in the UK during 2016. In the meantime I have been given a sneak peek as part of the microbit world tour.

The aim is to put the micro:bit into the hands of some Python programmers that can find out what is possible and create some useful code using micropython.

I only have the micro:bit for one week but hope to be able to try out a few things before I pass it on. The first thing I have done is to see how it can be programmed using the Raspberry Pi. I expect that there will be a number of Children that are given a micro:bit that already have a Raspberry Pi that they’d like to program it with. The process is not too difficult, the main part is installing the Chromium web browser which makes it easier to create the hex files that need to be transferred to the micro:bit.

In theory these instructions should work on any Raspberry Pi, but for performance reasons I suggest using a Raspberry Pi 2 if possible. This is based upon the Jessie version of Raspbian which is the current version when downloaded during December 2015.

See the video below which walks through the steps.

The link to the forum entry for Chromium is at: http://bit.ly/1P3kbbb. The editor that I used is available from https://github.com/ntoll/upyed, although I expect in future this will be available online direct from the Micro:Bit website.

The code that I write as part of this will be available at my GitHub page for Micro:Bit micropython

Details of the API for MicroPython on the Micro:Bit

Projects

Now you know how to program the micro:bit using MicroPython checkout these projects.