Developing Applications
for the BBC Microbit

The Story So Far

In Part 1 of my BBC micro:bit series, I explained the background of the BBC micro:bit, a remarkable programmable device which will inspire school children to get creative with coding and making things. I also shared a quick look at its architecture and main features.  In Part 2, I gave a guided tour of the micro:bit’s default Bluetooth^® profile. In this final blog post, I’ll be examining ways in which you can create code for the micro:bit, and how you can write code for other devices which allow them to interact with the micro:bit over Bluetooth.

Take Your Pick

One of the things I think sets the micro:bit apart from other comparable devices for the education sector is the fact there’s a significant collection of tools and languages available to the budding programmer. The fact that this has been accomplished in such a short time is testimony to the level of support there is out there from all sorts of organisations and technical communities.

There are several development tools for the complete beginner and I’ll discuss them next. But there are also approaches to developing for micro:bit which, coupled with the fact that its runtime is open source, mean you can get in very deep and learn anything and everything about what makes this device tick. There’s a joke about timers in there somewhere. I’ll leave that one to you.

This means the barrier to entry for becoming a micro:bit developer is very low but the ceiling governing how much you can learn is very high. Want to know how multiplexing and persistance of vision is used to make the micro:bit 5 x 5 LED display work? It’s all there in the runtime code and it’s described in Lancaster University’s excellent documentation.

Development Tools for Beginners

The BBC provided a collection of online development tools for beginners. I’ll discuss them shortly. Since the BBC’s site was launched, Microsoft has been busy creating their own micro:bit development site and I’ve been working with them to provide comprehensive capabilities for developers who want to make use of Bluetooth on the micro:bit.

codethemicrobit.com

The new Microsoft site is www.codethemicrobit.com and, in my opinion, it is by far the best of the online micro:bit development tools for beginners and the best tool if you want full access to the micro:bit’s Bluetooth profile.

It provides a visual programming, drag-and-drop tool involving building application logic by arranging graphical programming blocks representing predefined, parameterised functions. And it’s very easy to use.

To use Bluetooth in your micro:bit application you first need to add the Bluetooth package to your project using the menu More/Add Package.

Figure 1 – Adding the Bluetooth^® Package to a codethemicrobit Project

Once this is done, you have a complete collection of Bluetooth related ‘blocks’ with which to build the Bluetooth capabilities of your application. Many are very simple and merely result in a given Bluetooth service being available at run-time. But there are also blocks which provide access to Bluetooth connect and disconnect events and the Bluetooth UART service can be used to transmit arbitrary data to a connected peer or to receive data from a peer device.

Figure 2 – The codethemicrobit Bluetooth Package

If you read part 2 of my micro:bit blog series you’ll probably spot that there are a few services missing from the list of blocks above. For historical reasons relating to the BBC requirements, the Device Information, DFU and Event services are currently included automatically as long as you use at least one of the other services from the Bluetooth blocks shown above. We still have some work to do and the aim is for all Bluetooth services to have their own blocks in the codethemicrobit.com Bluetooth package so that you have complete control over exactly what Bluetooth capabilities your micro:bit code has.

To illustrate the power of codethemicrobit.com, here’s an application which implements the micro:bit side of my Animal Vegetable Mineral guessing game which you can see on our micro:bit page or in YouTube. It took only 10 minutes to create.

Figure 3 – micro:bit Animal, Vegetable, Mineral Guessing Game

I think Microsoft’s codethemicrobit.com is just fantastic and the team behind it has done an amazing job. It’s easy and it’s flexible, most importantly, for Bluetooth^® developers there are only a few constraints regarding what you can or cannot do.