Bloke launches twinkly range of BBC Micro:bit accessory boards A one-time storage hardware designer has launched a range of add-on boards for the BBC Micro:bit. Nevil Hunt – formerly a hardware designer for enterprise storage stuff firm Nexsan – was exhibiting his wares at the IoT Tech Expo, which took place in London’s Olympia conference centre earlier this week. “Kids are turned off by …
Edit: I see Gaz was onto this and has revised the article text.
I think what Nevil meant was that he's designed his own system/connector to mate with the pitch of the edge connector on the micro:bit - and in that respect he's dealing with what pitch the micro:bit designers chose and not numptyfying* anything.
2 FWIWs:
When the micro:bit first came out, getting hold of ANY compatible edge connectors (or even the spec for one) was a PITA until Kitronik et al started to make them available.
I have been playing with a few pre-production samples of Nevil's boards for a while - kudos to him for the effort put into the project.
*That's Numptizing for our North American friends.
* As in “small electric motor rotating an asymmetric weight to make your phone vibrate”, not “intimate massager”, you dirty-minded people.
Reminds me of school, a particularly nerdy young man build a "shock box" out of some bits and bobs, much hilarity ensued with the class shocking themselves until he made the comment that if you shocked a certain part of your body then it caused an "eruption" from somewhere intimate. Cut to the entire class running to the toilets to wash their hands.
Never underestimate the ability for kids to turn something innocuous into something rude. Anyone remember the Harry Potter "vibrating broomstick" and all the user reviews mentioning how their teenage daughters loved playing with it in their room?
http://www.methodshop.com/2003/12/harry-potter-broomstick.shtml
Scroll to the bottom of the article.
NIC's really need to have a very fast link to the ARM core, otherwise they're just painfully slow.
Unfortunately most of the little arm chips don't have the necessary fast external bus for this, so they hang it onto something else, like USB (e.g. the Raspberry Pi). This work, but is terribly slow. That's why the Pi is still only 10/100, and can't get anywhere near the 100Mb/s ceiling anyway.
Some board have the required hardware in the ARM silicon, so they *do* have a fast connection (e.g. Odroid C2). They're usually easy to spot as the have gigabit ethernet, and certainly in the case of the Odroid board, really do deliver on network bandwidth.
So for a dual NIC board you ideally need to find an ARM with a pair of MACs built in, with the external connectivity to drive a pair of external PHYs at a good speed.
Yes, I'd love a fast dual NIC little board too.
> Yes, I'd love a fast dual NIC little board too.
There's the Banana-Pi R1. It's designed to be used as a router - so 4 NICs plus a WAN port.
> It's designed to be used as a router - so 4 NICs plus a WAN port.
Are you sure about that - 4 NICs? I'm still looking for more detailed diagrams (are they available?) but the site you linked to shows that the board has a BCM53125 Ethernet Switch IC, which makes me think that the SoC has at most 2 NICs, one of which is connected to a port on this Switch. Not quite as flexible as 4 separate NICs.
Fair play to the lad, I wish him the best. However he's heading into a market that already has Raspberry Pi and a slew of cheap Adruino kit sets from China, some of which are dirt cheap on Amazon. I bought an Arduino set for £40 off Amazon the other day ( when they had the £10 off offer ) bucketloads of bits in the box that allow you build loads of projects, it's going to take a brave person to try to stave off that kind of cost effective kit.
I saw this at the Egham Raspberry Jam on Sunday.
He has 7 different boards all running from 1 micro:bit.
The problem with the micro:bit is that in its standard config there are only 3 I/O lines easily available without some kind of additional connector.
What Nevil has done is created a break out to bring the other lines to a standard 40 pin header. Making it usable with all the regular components and jumper wires out there.
It also breaks out the I2C lines.
The genius bit is it's clamped with screws, so easy to put together and they also still include the micro:bit edge connector so you can still plug it into other boards.
On the market. Over one million micro:bits were given away so even if 20% of them are being used that's a starting market of 200,00 that once you attached a couple of LEDs to will need some kind of adapter to let you do anything move complex with.
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