Play With Microbit
Lately we've been playing around with Microbit, a little development board for programming for little kids. It has a very user-friendly development tool, and MakeCode is the drag-and-drop interface. I was surprised at the chip, which is programmed with an nRF52833, which happens to be the same family as the module we wanted to work on, the nRF52840. We drove a digital tube and did some Bluetooth communication experiments with it. The whole board operates at about 7ma at normal times, which is a pretty good figure considering the esp32 is almost always 30ma at minimum, and bursts to almost 70ma when transmitting signals. it's a start on battery friendliness.
This is used to drive a digital tube, using the official library. With the convenience of wireless communication, this could easily be made into a digital tube display for wireless communication. In fact, according to our research, with the Bluetooth module and esphome's Bluetooth support, we can almost control this development board with HomeAssistant.
The cost of the entire board is much higher than the Arduino, the development board is about $15, while the robotbit expansion baseboard is about $7, the digitizer tube module is less than $1, and a Panasonic 18650 battery, about $4. These things can be combined with each other, so, all in all, it's a totally great value for trying to understand programming and logic.
Posted Sep 17, 2023, 1:31 PM UTC