I’ve just bought a couple of ESP8266 modules, these things look great! A system on a chip with Wifi and TCP/IP stack. It can host applications too.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13252

No need to connect it up to an Arduino etc (although you can if your app has more complex requirements), this thing can run your app, integrate with sensors and send data to the web. Not bad for about £3 a go.

First project is a temperature logger.

Nice one! Temp loggers are great – see my image above, although my Pi’s produce their own graphs I do like the above log visualisation provided by Initial State.

I was around for the last BBC micro and FWIW I think the BBC should butt out now (as they should have then).
If this is really a different market segment then let Raspberry fill it with an appropriate new model.

Raspberry is generating a huge up-swell in hobby coding unseen since my Sinclair fanboi days. Why cut that fan-base and all of the online forums & help sources in half.

This is not a hardware war (Playstation vs Xbox or 26″vs 29″). Its more like choosing Spanish vs Esperanto and then spending the next 3 years of your life learning it

The BBC thing will be in just UK and as such will ultimately fizzle out. The Pi has a huge following worldwide and ain’t going anywhere soon.

Older coverage from the Grauniad: BBC Micro Bit will complement Raspberry Pi not compete with it (March 2015).

This is not a hardware war (Playstation vs Xbox or 26″vs 29″). Its more like choosing Spanish vs Esperanto and then spending the next 3 years of your life learning it

True, but one of the powerful facts of hardware and software is that there is so much variety.

I wouldn’t want kids growing up thinking Esperanto was the only language. Or that Spain was the only country. 😀

It’s a growing market sector with varieties of Arduino, RasPi and CHIP.

From what I gather the micro:bit is probably closer to an Arduino than a RasPi, i.e. it sounds like it is an easily-programmable embedded device rather than RasPi which runs a full OS (if it wants to).

I am a little bit uncomfortable with the BBC using its position to flood the market with a million free devices. But if it gets more kids into it then fair play – I certainly benefited from access to the original BBC Micro when I was a lad.

The BBC thing will be in just UK

So was the Pi when it started though.

Indeed it was – the first run was 50 pieces (I know the guy who designed and built the first batch).
I just don’t really get why the BBC are doing this. There’s plenty of [better] alternatives to choose from. Free stuff is always good though.

There’s plenty of [better] alternatives to choose from.

Such as?

Off the top of my head I can’t think of anything that has all the LEDs, switches and sensors built in like this does. It’s accessible and inherently cool, 12-year old me would have exploded at the prospect.

There’s plenty of [better] alternatives to choose from.

This does seem to have a unique aspect to it that the others fail at: a very simple accessible IDE and flashing routine.

(Arduino IDE comes close once it is set up properly, but you still have to fanny about selecting the right board type and serial port, plug and unplug USB, etc)

It’s accessible and inherently cool

I’m obviously missing something then as I see it as limited – unless all you want to do is make LEDs flash.
I suppose that as it’s aimed at 10-11 year olds then maybe that is all they want to do! But if, in order to do more, you need to hook it up to a Pi or Arduino then would it not have been easier to just start with those in the first place – or are they ‘too complicated’ for that age group?

Edit: just sort of answering my own question here …. if they sell them for £10 you could potentially install one in every room and have it send temp data to a central Pi that could then do something clever. Hmmm.

It’s got accelerometer/gyroscopic sensors, input buttons and bluetooth. So you could have it communicate with a phone/tablet etc.

That’s the thing. You’re thinking like an adult.

The problem you’ll have with your average 11 year old won’t be the limitations of the device, it’ll be engaging the buggers in the first place. You can do more with an Arduino or a Pi or a ‘real’ computer sure, but a little gizmo full of flashing lights? That’s awesome.

But if, in order to do more, you need to hook it up to a Pi or Arduino then would it not have been easier to just start with those in the first place – or are they ‘too complicated’ for that age group?

A Pi or Arduino doesn’t have Bluetooth LE, accelerometer, compass, 25 LEDs and two buttons built-in though.

Yeah you can add stuff like that, either via an assortment of Pi Hats or Arduino Shields or by building your own bits on a breadboard, but that’s definitely a bit more advanced and the result isn’t easily wearable as a badge! (until you get further down the line and start soldering up your own circuits).

My bits and pieces arrived for my “internet of things” temperature sensor!

Now logging temperature and humidity chez pies here:-

https://www.freeboard.io/board/FF-KPV

Data coming from the kit below (blue module on right hand side = DHT11 temp/humidity sensor, mini-board facing camera with red led on is the ESP8266 Wifi module which is polling the DHT11 every 10 seconds and then posting the temp/humidty to the web via my home wireless). Left hand module on breadboard is a 3.3v PSU, red vertical module is a USB to serial module used to program the 8266, it’s not active now the thing is running.

Nice! Pointless. But nice. 😀

Not pointless, I’ve now moved it into my beer fridge 🙂

This little 8266 device is amazing! It’s now in a fridge which is in a garage attached to the house (where the wireless router is). The wireless reception in the garage is a bit ropey and this thing is sitting in a metal fridge in there 😛

Def not pointless – see below:

That’s one of the images created by my Raspberry Pi powered DHW temperature sensor in a house we have 107 miles away, and a drop of 50c within 10 mins showed that something was quite wrong …. Especially as we had left the house 24hrs earlier!

A drop in the air temp in that room suggested that the heat source (heat leaking from the megaflo) had been removed, so maybe there was a leak 😯

Luckily a friend was still in the village and he popped up and discovered a blown push fit connection on the hot water supply to the sink in the garage. Luckily this is the lowest room in the house by about 18″ and the water was flowing out under the garage door.

Scary to think that if I had’t put some system monitoring in, this could have gone unnoticed for weeks and been pretty costly in terms of water usage if nothing else!

I’ve now moved it into my beer fridge

Maybe you could expand it to something like this?
Beer fridge of awesomeness

I think the biggest advantage of the BBC device is that it doesn’t need any technical knowledge to start out.

Teachers are not, on the whole, technologists. They don’t want to muck about like a hobbyist will. they want a device they can understand in 20 minute and deliver a lesson to a class of 30 nine year olds in the knowledge that they’ll get consistent, repeatable results.

The inherent flexibility of the Pi is also a huge hurdle for acceptance by generalist teachers in primary schools (and also for parents at home).

I think the bbc device is, like, Scratch – a gateway to a more complex environment. The key thing is you can do ‘cool stuff’ within 10 minutes of picking it up.

also, we don’t all own houses that are unoccupied for weeks on end so teaching kids how to monitor the temperature of the garage might not be seen as a particular enticement to learning and exploration, it has to be said.

Bookmarked 🙂