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New Zealand's longest-running online daily news and commentary publication, now in its 25th year. The opinion pieces presented here are not purported to be fact but reasonable effort is made to ensure accuracy.

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Micro Bit trumps Raspberry Pi?

1 June 2016

As far as single board computers (SBCs) go, the Raspberry Pi (RP) has to be perhaps the single most successful product ever sold.

However, the BBC are rolling out their own SBC and I've already commented on this new device in a previous column (finding that is left as an exercise for the reader).

The BBC device is called the BBC Micro Bit and, by SBC standards, is a pretty simple and relatively basic device -- lacking the power and sophistication of the ARM processor of the RP and only capable of running what most would consider to be "systems-level" code.

Yeah,it's a microcontroller with some LEDs and some interfacing yet, rather surprisingly, it costs more than twice as much as the cheapest RP (the RP Zero). What the?

Unlike the RP, the BBC's offering won't let you hook up an HDMI display, play HD video or even attach a keyboard. Want to run Linux? Pffhhtttt... you have to be kidding!

Never the less, this little board is reportedly winning fans and exciting young minds in a way that the RP does not.

How the hell can this be?

I suspect the answer is simple... kids these days are already used to interacting with complex and powerful GUIs. Highly animated video games are also "ho hum" to a generation that has been bought up with computing power that was, just a generation or two ago, unimaginable.

What these kids are not familiar with or used to is being able to turn a single LED off and on by cutting some code.

Sure, you can do this with an RP but you'll need some hardware smarts plus a few extra components or expander board. This can be a real hurdle to many -- so an SBC which allows you to do this stuff just by cutting some code with your PC, tablet or smartphone is a much more practical proposition.

Although I'm sure that many seasoned professionals, such as those who regularly read the pages of Aardvark, will find it hard to believe but the simple act of creating a "real world" effect (ie: turning on an LED) can have a hugely more awe-inspiring effect than writing a complex FPS game with 4K graphics on a multi-core mega-computer.

Most traditional programming only changes things in the virtual world that lives inside your computer. Even producing a change on the LCD in front of your face is kind of ho-hum because every program you run does that to some extent or another. Being able to cause a bunch of LEDs to flicker and change according to your coding commands is however, a whole different kettle of fish.

I can see exactly why kids might get excited by this little SBC.

Of course I suspect that reports like this one about the BBC's SBC published *by* the BBC may be somewhat less than totally objective in respect to the success being enjoyed by this device but having always enjoyed cutting code that interacts with real-world hardware, I tend to believe there's more than a germ of truth involved.

Never the less, one must ask how on earth they can justify a price of NZ$20 or more per unit -- and that's with a minimum purchase quantity of 90 units.

The answer is almost certainly down to the level of support software and courseware that are available. From what I can gather, a lot of work has been put into the development and debugging tools that will make this SBC a hell of a lot easier to use than the myriad of other SBC development or experimenter's systems currently on the market.

However, one could also ask why on earth the BBC didn't just use the Arduino as its educational platform. This already has more support and extra hardware/software than you can shake a stick at and is available at a lower cost than the Micro Bit.

My hope is that the BBC offering will actually do what the RP was intended to do -- cultivate strong levels of interest and experimentation within the ranks of the young.

The RP has succeeded to a degree in this market but I would wager that a hell of a lot of the devices sold to date are being used by folk who are already very computer-savvy. These RPs sit quietly, acting as media servers, firewalls and performing a myriad of other techy-tasks that would previously have required an old PC or similar hardware using much more power and potentially being far less reliable.

I will keep an eye on the Micro Bit but I won't be purchasing one -- not at the price they're asking for these things. And sadly, I doubt we'll see them appearing in NZ schools any time soon, for much the same reason.

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