Okay, i’ll be frank. I have never heard of what a micro:bit is. I’ve heard of a whole suite of micro controllers like Arduino (ESP32, Nano, etc) and the Raspberry-Pi series of stuff. Erm. This is new.
On the surface, it looks very different from what a typical micro-controller might look like. Instead, the micro-bit sports a 5 by 5 grid of LEDs on the front with two buttons on the side.
But really, it has a whole suite of sensors and buttons on-board.
These are actually quite exciting as i’m curious to see with these sensors onboard, how i can utilise it in the coming project. But to me what excites me the most. Is the bluetooth capability of it. Yes, i know its nothing new. But this being the micro-controller we are tasked to work with, i am excited that i can create possibly something that is small and detachable from the computer for my project.
Today we sort of relived a bit of my childhood. Never thought i will be seeing these little guys again.
It was fun to create my own little dude with that 5 by 5 LED panel.
Though this obviously is a hugely simplified version of what the original Tamagotchi is, its fun to see how i could program some logic into it rather easily. While the exercise in class was really about creating a face then adding some logic to keeping it happy. It was quite funny to inject little blocks of input like sound. Which was what most of us did during break time. Sounded like a freaking ZOO at one point. I found that quite funny and amusing. The fact that we all just picked it up and went crazy with it.
Though the interactions on the tamagotchi was simple, what i loved was how fast i could program some logic, some design elements and have a working prototype by just dragging “blocks” and linking them together on the editor. All that in 5 minutes. Without writing a single line of code.