Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Paul Rubin Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: BBC MicroBit has arrived - which Forth in Python is recommended for now? Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2016 12:14:32 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 37 Message-ID: <8737jonqlj.fsf@nightsong.com> References: <840cddee-749a-4aab-9644-4cfe42371840@googlegroups.com> <5fbfa685-6b97-4f6b-bb09-31f6d7e152f4@googlegroups.com> <49524e24-d693-41a1-b735-f85da37f93ca@googlegroups.com> <20160910133738.7385696c@HP-6550b> <87y42zijpi.fsf@jester.gateway.pace.com> <8a35ccd9-6f4e-4627-af76-2a906d1fb469@googlegroups.com> <68b77e8d-1a48-4a93-acf8-5f40c131f51a@googlegroups.com> <8737jspxpr.fsf@nightsong.com> <2bd9a162-5aa3-41a8-8279-0d275443d3f9@googlegroups.com> <20161020100051.795a847e@HP-6550b> <2a2eb65c-9048-4c1e-904b-a41fbcb88b78@googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="fa514a16e0634e132e320287686e3191"; logging-data="28591"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/jNqUBCOFJifYANcopyKoE" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:v4EQyejOG2iT0GLCCO37I+gAa1I= sha1:miTh37JaqFE5vNS0LvE2k2YZ+G4= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.forth:52119 rickman writes: > If the MicroBit gets kids interested in programming and > microcomputers, then it is a good thing.... In that light it is not > surprising some of those here are telling that they are not impressed > with the high price of the Microbit or the lack of the features they > desire. The intended student audience is getting them for free, so that's great from their perspective. It's just somewhat expensive for those of us who have to pay for our own boards. I do think the Microbit processor has too little capacity for its intended audience, given that part of the educational plan is for students to run MicroPython on it. I've played with MicroPython a little myself and have chatting with its developer community. Apparently the Microbit is just barely powerful enough to run MicroPython, and MicroPython had to be hacked rather mercilessly to get it to fit in the Microbit. So it would be significantly better for MicroPython if the Microbit cpu had more ram, say 32k instead of 16k (the 256k flash is sufficient). From a Forth POV, the Microbit is great except for its cost. 256k of flash and 16k of ram is enough to run a rather fancy Forth including a code editor, blocks, etc. It's also fine for embedded C, having far more flash and ram than the popular Atmega328 used in the Arduino. If they sold it for $5 instead of $17, I'd buy a pile of them, but as it is there are other boards that I see as more cost effective. The ESP8266 has no usable on-chip flash afaik, so the cheap ESP modules flooding Aliexpress generally have 4MB of SPI flash on the module. Something like that on the Microbit (or an SD socket) would be terrific. The ESP8266 itself has about 36k of usable ram and people are running full MicroPython on it quite nicely. Those boards are well under $5 (Wemos D1, see wemos.cc) so they're popular in the MicroPython crowd. I expect if the Microbit gains traction there will be new and better versions in the future. It may get more interesting then.