micro:bit is a System-On-Chip (SOC) development board powered by ARM core. The support for this development has been outstanding and beginer friendly.

The board is slick with minimal design and compact for quick prototyping.

micro:bit hardware

If the above pic looks overwhelming, relax, we are going to decode the components that matter the most as a developer.

Application Processor

Our code is executed in the application processor.

micro:bit hardware

The processor is an Arm Cortex-M4 32 bit processor supporting cool features like

  1. 25 General Purpose Input Ouput (GPIO) pins
  2. 64MHz Clock speed
  3. 512kB Flash ROM
  4. 128kB RAM
  5. 2.4Ghz Radio transceiver
  6. Support for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
  7. Support for NFC

The GPIOs provides the interface for external devices to talk with the processor.

Bluetooth

micro:bit hardware

The on-board 2.4GHz antenna provides the required transceiver for setting up the bluetooth connection. The Nordic S113 SoftDevice provides the BLE energy stack to easily communicate with other Bluetooth devices. With this current protocol stack, upto 4 connections, as a Peripheral, can connect concurrently to a Broadcaster.

With the 2.4GHz transceiver its possible to connect with multiple devices that operate in this range including WiFi in the 2.4GHz range, wireless microphone, speakers, etc.

Peripherals

The bunch of other peripherals present connected on-boards are:

  1. Speaker
  2. Compass
  3. Accelerometer
  4. Microphone
  5. 5x5 LED matrix
  6. Tactile buttons
  7. GPIOs
  8. Temperature Sensor

All these peripherals are clearly marked on the board for easy identification.

Programming

micro:bit is easily programmable with micro-python and rust.

For python there are really cool gamified online editors like

  1. MakeCode editor

  2. Python online editor

    All these come with easy plugins to push code to micro:bit