BBC Reveals Its New Microcomputer Design 97
The BBC has revealed the final design for its Micro Bit computer, a programmable board the size of a credit card they hope will inspire the same love of technology that the BBC Micro did in 1981. The Micro Bit includes an array of LEDs, buttons, and a motion sensor. It can be powered via USB, or by an addon pack with AA batteries. It's not intended as a competitor to devices like the Raspberry Pi or the Arduino — it is intended to complement them while remaining simple for educational purposes. In October, the BBC will begin distributing the Micro Bit to students in grade 7. They expect to give away about a million of them. Afterward, the device will go on sale, and its specs will be open sourced.
Oh no, (Score:4, Funny)
Socialism!
Re: Oh no, (Score:1)
He means ARM.
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Your mean what was then, and still is now, one of the most respected public service broadcasters, worldwide?
With a long history of attacking the British Government in power?
(but especially if they're right wing, it must be said).
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What is your definition of independent? Independent from whom? Cause the rest of your post sure sounds like they are independent -- just not representative of what you want them to be.
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The BBC tells us that Wikileaks taught us nothing new and was just a slight embarrassment to the US government.
When dealing with Snowden they say nothing about the actual leaked information outside of, "bulk collection of email and telephone metadata". The story is always, "Is he a spy for the Chinese, or Russia?", "What's his motive?" etc.
I just went to the BBC website and searched for Wikileaks (http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=Wikileaks)
Top 4 results:
Nope, nothing there about actual leaked content.
Listen to radio 4. It feels like a creepy recreation of the empire circa 1954 right up until the world service kicks in whereupon a few of the opinions that were verboten during the day can now be expressed.
Radio 4? Really? The station with the rep of being for the middle aged (and older), middle class liberals? I mean cutting edge it isn'
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Don't feel bad for being duped. There is no single "Great Deception". The BBC is very clever at taking a story apart and spreading all the facts across multiple programs shown at different times. You can see a documentary during the middle of the night that adds contextual detail that would have changed the tone of the reporting at the time.
But you asked for an example so I'll describe the last time I listened closely to the BBC reporting an ongoing story. It was during the hostage situation in Mali. I
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no doubt you have a list of broadcasting networks that don't engage in this sort of stuff
so where is it?
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MBC? (Score:2)
Too bad they couldn't come up with a name which would have been "BBC" for the acronym.
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I'm sure I could go on
Re:MBC? (Score:5, Funny)
For a moment there I thought you were channeling Captain Haddock.
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They called it the Micro Bit, though. So it's the BBC Micro Bit. Considering their famous 1980s microcomputer, the BBC Micro... I think it's kind of an affectionate name.
It has a sort of poetry to it, too. The beeb made Acorn's BBC Model B (and later the Archimedes, which did well with compatibility) sell very well into schools. For the Archimedes, Acorn branched out into RISC chip design -- they literally designed their own chip for their computer. That little chip was the ARM -- Acorn RISC Machine... they
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They should have gone for New BBC Computer, yes, the BBC NBC, that wouldn't be confusing at all. Of course I'm an American who happens to watch too much BBC America, and probably find it funnier than anybody in the UK would.
Who's Next? (Score:1)
Baba O'Reilly?
Sign of the Beast (Score:2)
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TFS says: "It's not intended as a competitor to devices like the Raspberry Pi or the Arduino — it is intended to complement them while remaining simple for educational purposes" so it appears that is NOT in fact what they say they have done.
Re:NIH? (Score:5, Interesting)
....that's right...despite it being extraordinarily similar to those devices, and targeted at an extraordinarily similar market and for actually identical reasons....it's in no way competing! *cough*
*cough*
*cough*
Excuse me. I seem to have developed a *cough*. But each *cough* is entirely unique and unrealted to the previous *cough*.
There is only one real *cough* in this comment. Any fool can tell the difference.
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By "extraordinarily similar" I presume you mean "not very similar".
The Arduino does almost nothing by itself, you need to add a shield just to blink an LED, or wire one up yourself. The only programming language it supports is a simplified C++, which isn't exactly ideal for teaching 11 year olds.
The Raspberry Pi is a full computer with video and sound output, operating system etc.
The MicroBit has an LED display and a number of peripherals built in. There is a custom software environment. These two factors a
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Right, except that you're forgetting that the MicroBit can be plugged into and programmed from a Raspberry Pi. You can't do that in the other direction, so the devices don't actually even fit the same use cases.
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And, once again, they've come up with an oddball, just for the sake of doing it.
The 1980's attempt was like an anemic version of an Apple II or Commodore Amiga. The BBC museum has been begging for volunteers to fix/maintain their 1980's computer systems. 30 years from now, they'll have the same problem with this new system.
The current [proposed] system is so watered down that any student will be bored within 1-2 years. A Raspberry Pi would delight well into adulthood. Also, a young adult will have a bet
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The 1980's attempt was like an anemic version of an Apple II or Commodore Amiga.
The BBC Micro was 1/4 of the price of the Apple II and pre-dated the Amiga by several years, so that's hardly a fair comparison.
The current [proposed] system is so watered down that any student will be bored within 1-2 years.
You really don't think that something that can engage a school kid for a year or two isn't worthwhile?
Given that the BBC is part of the UK gov't, perhaps they rejected the Pi because they couldn't convince the foundation that adding the anti-terrorist/surveillance tech [that Cameron has been yakking about] was a good idea. Or, that the Pi was "too powerful" for school children and could be used by terrorists ... Just sayin' ...
I heard it was because the Pi generates a signal that blocks the Reptilian mind control devices implanted in every Freeview tuner...
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I had forgotten about the Commodore C64, which is a fairer comparison, given that it competed head on against the BBC micro in sales in the UK [per wiki on C64]. It came out one year later, but also consider the predecessor VIC-20 which came out at the same time as the BBC micro.
I was being kind about the 1-2 years. More like 1-2 months. Remember, this is going to 7th graders (~12 years old--they play video games and use cell phones). The Pi has enough in it to accommodate all of the curriculum from 7th
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The BBC may have only had half the memory in its most common form, but it had expansion ports the C64 could only dream of, a far superior BASIC implementation (with a built-in assembler), networking, disk drives that couldn't also be used as space heaters (and before you go on about the extra 6502 inside the 1541 disk drive - how many people actually made use of it?), co-processors, multiple ROM slots, and full
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That said, this thing is a brain-dead toylet [as opposed to toilet, a different, bigger, quite useful thing] born
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I value the BBC [and I'm an American]. Particularly, I'm a fan of the kinder/gentler/subtler comedies: As Time Goes By, Waiting for God, Joking Apart, The Good Life, To The Manor Born [or anything Penelope Keith does :-)].
But, they should [should have] stuck to broadcasting [what they do best]. It seems strange that they would delve into a microcomputer board for school children. This would be more the province of a department of education [or some such]. Perhaps, they have more spare cash to subsidize
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Raspberry Pi is some kind of Unix workstation with USB peripherals and a big firmware blob you have to cater to. Seems more complex than even a PC that runs DOS. A microcontroller that only runs your program, not an OS is simpler still.
Want! (Score:2)
Subject says it all...
Compromised by not being wearable (Score:2)
I don't know the reason but this became a lot less interesting as soon as the battery was altered, would have been a useful wearable...
Pity
John Jones
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The battery is just a battery. Those who are into wearables likely find no practical issue with grabbing an existing coin cell holder with leads and JST connector (or just solder one on themselves) and plugging that in - or with using a small lipo pouch (presuming the circuitry is tolerant to the voltage).
It is a shame that the slot (itself a holder) was removed mainly because of the fear that little children will eat absolutely anything, but I can understand the decision given that it is targeted to (sli
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I don't know the reason but this became a lot less interesting as soon as the battery was altered, would have been a useful wearable...
Pity
John Jones
What would you use it for as a wearable? The LED matrix is too spread out to be very readable, so what would you do with it clipped to your shirt that you couldn't also do with it in your pocket?
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The LED matrix is too spread out to be very readable
because alphanumeric text is the ONLY thing you can do with an LED matrix?
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The LED matrix is too spread out to be very readable
because alphanumeric text is the ONLY thing you can do with an LED matrix?
That's not an answer, that's a question -- what would you do with this thing if you could wear it? It's relatively big and bulky compared to some other purpose made wearables, so what would you really want to do with it if it were wearable?
Byte Pushers (Score:1)
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because these devices get more expensive over time? is that how it works?
The difference... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real difference between the BBC Micro of 1981 and the BBC Micro Bit of 2015 is 34 years of changes in society and technology.
I was at school when the first BBC Micro appeared. My school built a special computer laboratory to accommodate two of these mystical devices! (they forgot to add burglar alarms and decent locks so it all got stolen). A year later the school acquired a ZX Spectrum which was housed with the science block. It was all very exciting, such that it occasionally and temporarily displaced burning interests in alcohol, cigarettes and certain photo journalism features of traditionally attired ladies in National Geographic magazine.
The BBC has a remit (to educate, entertain, inform). But this is not 1981. Which UK home that contains a person stimulated by maths, technology or computers science does not also already have a PC or and Android device?
This looks a lot like the BBC puffing itself up, and trying to needlessly and damagingly compete with people who are already informing, educating and entertaining, in much the same way that they are destroying the independent local press in the UK and crushing small production companies. George Osborne was not kidding when he described the BBC's ambitions and actions as having an imperial taint. If there is one thing an empire cannot tolerate it is an entity which offers an alterantive, however good, bad, big or small.
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But this is not 1981. Which UK home that contains a person stimulated by maths, technology or computers science does not also already have a PC or and Android device?
Right, but in 1981, I presume that in order to get the computer to do anything fun, you had to learn how to program it. Today's computers and phones are basically complete as far as anything a kid would want to do with them. Even in the mid-1990s when I got my first computer, it would have become an "AOL box" if I hadn't had a family friend who was a programmer. Sure, by high school they might have some ideas that might require going a little deeper than ready-made software, but microcontrollers do from
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It isn't just that modern computers are 'completed.' They are essentially closed off. The old machines some of us grew up with powered up to a programming interface. A prompt at which you could start typing in a BASIC program for the most part.
Modern software systems have abstracted things completely away from this sort of interface, for better in the case of usability but for worse in terms of prodding a young new user to actually learn to program it. There are huge abstract toolchains that have to be
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the old machines were usually programmed in BASIC, with a simple command line interface.
100 % non-standard, un-documented, buggy, programs from the 1980s?
Back then, the computer came with a book designed to teach a bit of rudimentary programming.
Except in order to actually get anything done on those "old computers" you needed hardware manuals that didn't come with the computer.
On a modern computer, you'll have to find and install the right tools first
yeah those tools DO NOT EVEN EXIST on the older systems.
if you know what to look for.
Holy Fucking Christ, there is a URL ON THE BOX that directs you to the documentation. OMFG, it works for cereal boxes!
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Are you off your meds?
Uhm, the programs were as "un-documented, buggy" as YOU made them because YOU PROGRAMMED them. And Computers from the early 80s came with well-documented user manuals that explained the interface and the programming language in the system ROMs. There was a lot of quality software available, all one needed was to go down the the local
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I've recently been pawing through my old Basic manuals (I'm implementing a Basic environment for run). And what stands out is how incomplete and limited most of the old environments were (although I did love them at the time).
The Basics were grossly limited. Examples includes the Sinclair AND and OR statements, the very limited FN statements and severe limitations on FOR loops. Given the high expense of disks in those days, it's no surprise that disk handling was uneven at best.
Networking capabilities we
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In 1981 the scarcity was in access to the hardware. It was truly expensive, in the same way that cars are expensive, or the deposit for the mortgage on your home is expensive. Once you had the hardware you could, if preferred, just copy stuff from magazines by hand or buy cassette tapes. The BBC did something laudable in removing that financial barrier and opening up computing to every interested pupil in every UK school that had a headmaster with several brain cells and a maths/physics teacher with an i
Different ages (Score:2)
More important: in those days, a computer (any computing device) for your personal use, was the big new thing. PC's were in their early days, extremely costly for the average person, and mostly used in businesses for accounting tasks, text processing etc. In their own home, people had perhaps the odd electronic game (a la Pong), but
Re:The difference... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh get over yourself.
What it looks like to me is that the BBC have done something interesting: they've made a tiny, simple, deliberately friendly little computer that is designed to be really programmed (unlike Android phones and countless other things), has sensors and inputs that are easy to use, has LEDs that make it cute and fun, could be used as a tiny little computer, in technology lessons, connected up to real things, with none of the distraction power of a tablet device, none of the 'just use it like a PC with a monitor and keyboard' aspects that are collecting around the Raspberry Pi, and WAY more of the imagination. Plus it can connect to all the devices you are talking about.
The Beeb will make next to no money out of this -- if anything. They've already committed that they will not make money out of it on the world market, which is thriving and competitive. This is a perfectly Reithian thing; it's too small to threaten any competitor, and can indeed work with them.
And do you know what is ruining the local press? It sure isn't the BBC. What killed the local press was the Daily Mail General Trust, which turned every single newspaper it earned into a small local paramilitary offshoot of their tawdry bullshit. Local papers were shit before the BBC went heavily local.
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I think this device is a great step in the right direction. Hopefully, there will be a version with LED character display some day. I'm still looking for a device with the following features:
- small
- LED display
- battery powered and long battery life (like older calculators)
- "instant" on (no long booting)
- a little buzzer and built-in clock with wake up function for alarms
- easy to program with a simple API (preferably in Ada, Scheme, Lisp or Basic, but on-board assembler would also be fine)
- mini keyboard
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I'm still looking for a device with the following features
classic example of a solution in search of a problem
keep looking...
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Why, I want to have such a device. It's not for problem solving but for fun.
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This isn't a PC, it's a device, you can use it to make things. This is about the pleasure of soldering, gluing, painting and programming a little Python to make something cool.
Tiny, very cheap, very powerful (relatively) things like this make all kinds of projects trivial. For example, with my kids I put a motion sensor and a loudspeaker on an old r-pi, put it in a chinese takeaway box, painted it like a robot head, and installed it in the downstairs toilet. Now bogbot says disrespectful things to visitor
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Yes, how did the BBC ever dare to compete with Commodore, Apple, etc back in the 1980's. What imperialists!
Signed /A guy who learned programming on a BBC Micro
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This looks a lot like the BBC puffing itself up, and trying to needlessly and damagingly compete with people who are already informing, educating and entertaining
You're going to have to explain how giving an educational computer device to schools for free is "puffing up" and "needlessly damaging" to anything.
Otherwise I may reach the conclusion you're an idiot grinding entirely unrelated gears.
This is the BBC doing what we pay them to do. I have my doubts about how successful it may be, but I see absolutely no problem with its intentions.
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Which UK home that contains a person stimulated by maths, technology or computers science does not also already have a PC or and Android device?
and how many of those homes use the device for anything other that games, email, web browsing?
The point of this thing is not to be a computer, but to be the bare bones of an educational device. It has no tv-out for example. It'll be used to teach the "how computers work" course in the curriculum and that's it. There'll be no taking it home to use as a media centre,
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Well... a couple of weeks ago I played Pong on an 8x8 pixel display. The 'paddles' were simple potentiometers dangling from a few wires. But you know what: it was actually playable. And fun, too. Well okay... mostly for the 'novelty' factor.
So Elite on a 5x5 pixel display? Hell why not!
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Apparently its 18 times faster than the original BBC B, so yes it should....
but as there's no monitor output, controlling your ship is going to be tricky.
Raspberry Pi (Score:1)
This is the same mission that the Raspberry Pi was designed to fulfill. Even to the point of the Pi serving as the modern-day BBC Micro that it's designers has grown up with.
There's always room for more than one pedagogical computer intended for schoolkids, I guess.
So when are all the adult hackers gonna climb on this one and gripe about it, as many have with the Pi? (clue: it wasn't designed for you.)
Volume control (Score:1)
Can't be bothered to fucking fact-check (Score:1)
"An add-on power pack, fitted with AA batteries, will be needed to use it as a standalone product."
"Each BBC Micro Bit will now use a discrete battery pack, which can be removed from the device."
I guess the /. editors can't even be fucking bothered to do any fact-checking, now days. Pretty much Soulskill, Timothy, and everyone else posting stories (advertisements) without exercising any proper journalism skills, you're all guilty of this shit.
NOWHERE in the article is USB-powered mentioned.
Oh, this computer
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I've read a few things about it today, and it's going to be mbed [mbed.org] based [mbed.org], which has me chuffed because I'm a big mbed fan, and that means that the USB port will obviously be for programming and power. And once it's programmed, the battery means it won't have to stay plugged into a computer to flash its blinkenlights.
The CPU they're using not only has a Bluetooth module, it even supports programming over Bluetooth. At that point you'll probably want a battery to make up for the lack of a USB connection.
What
Arduino should have done this (Score:2)
I don't think this will compete so much with the RaspberryPi, but it's clearly muscling in on Arduino territory. What a pity Arduino has stood still for so long. I know they've had some internal problems, but well before then the Arduino Uno was looking over-priced and long in the tooth. There are more powerful Arduinos but they are even more expensive, and lacking the focus which made the Uno such a success.
Compact, low-cost, low-power, modern processor, and built-in sensors and LEDs - the Micro Bit
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The main feature of the old 8 bit computers was that you could plug them in and start programming in a simple environment - you didn't need anything else.
For most of those older computers the "development environment" was not built-in, it was an "extra cost" add on that was significantly expensive.
Sure you could program the Commodore 64 out of the box, but you didn't get far unless you also paid the extra big $$$ for the hardware manuals.
So limited... (Score:1)
Let's see it has a couple buttons and a what, 8x8 grid of LEDs for output? No keyboard input, no video display, no ability to program the device without a much more powerful computer on which to prepare executable code to be downloaded onto the device.
Uhm, how exactly does this bring computer programming to the masses? Why couldn't the kids be taught to use the same programming language natively on the much more powerful computer that is needed to program this circuit board?
Aside from the processing speed o
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I stand corrected - I only glanced at the device briefly.
This "platform" requires even more "bits" to setup than a Raspberry Pi, which is really saying something because the Raspberry Pi includes almost nothing by design:
- no case
- no power supply
- no input device (keyboard/mouse)
- no output device (monitor)
This Micro Bit has no case and trivial input/output (a 5x5 grid of LEDs and two (2!) momentary switches. No provision for a keyboard, no provision for a display, and to program it requires a complete Win
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oh let me see now... because programming a 'real' computer is quite an abstract experience, or else a pointless one. Programming something with lights and buttons is far more immediate, and has a smaller learning curve. Kids up and down the UK will soon be writing scrolling messages to each other with this, where none of them did any sort of programming before.
This isn't a game-changer by any means, but it's a nice toy that will (hopefully) help a few kids realise that programming isn't all that hard, so lo
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When I was growing up there were thousands of games that had horrible displays and were fun because we didn't have access to anything better - I'm thinking of the battery-operated "football" and "baseball" games that had a few buttons, a handful of LEDs, a generic playing field on the case, and some obnoxious sound effects.
How will this "toy" engage a child that was raised on today's video consoles and smart phones?
Ok, I admit it. (Score:2)
I had absolutely no clue that the British Broadcasting Corp designs computers.
Why? (Score:3)