Week 1 – Hello World

The aim was to use the accelerometers of the microbit to calculate how far the device had moved

Starting from basics, the first step was to get the microbit device out of the box and run a basic program on it. This seems obvious and a small step, but it moves the project from being one on paper, to one where things are actually happening.

Connecting the the device to a laptop was easy (although the cable wasn’t very long). I was expecting to need to download and install the python program to run things from, but it runs through a browser at: https://python.microbit.org/v/2

Thats ok, as it runs even when you are offline (which probably isn’t often these days), and it does mean that I could run things from my chromebook.

‘I find new terminology confusing (it might have helped if I had read the manual instead of jumping straight in), but after realising that you needed to:
– “connect” to the Microbit (ittook me a minute or two to realise that you needed to click on the device name itself before clicking on ‘Connect’),
– “download” the program to the device
and away it went with the “hello world” program.

program0.py
That was a great start, and a chance to show family and friends what this strange device did, although it did deviate into changing the text and seeing the different images that we could create.
First Microbit program


By the way, I try to keep the microbit inside the anti static bag to protect the device from electrostatic discharge. This is when an electrically charged object, such as the human body comes into contact with an electronic device, static electricity is discharged, which could damage the components inside the microbit.


The ‘save’ function was a was a bit involved, so instead I cut and paste into notepad++ (which I use a lot when writing software).


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