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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : sort of relevant..
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CaptainBoing Guru  Joined: 07/09/2016 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2170 |
anyone using these? seems to be a very quiet also-ran https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/13/updated_bbc_microbit/ |
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RetroJoe Senior Member  Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 290 |
Looks like a very capable teachIng device. And, love the comments in the Register article :) I’ve always been fascinated by the nostalgic love affair with the BBC Micro (some of it evident on the TBS posts). We never had a “national computer” in North America - the closest we came to something like that collective experience was the Apple II, which was pushed very heavily in the K-12 markets via steep educational discounts. The consequence of that pricing strategy was that they were too expensive for most families to afford for home. I believe something similar happened with the BBC Micro, which opened the door for Sinclair in the UK and Commodore in North America to dominate the affordable home computer market. Contrary to popular belief, the C64 was the best selling and technically superior 8-bit computer of its era - it’s SID sound chip is legendary to this day. Enjoy Every Sandwich / Joe P. |
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thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4311 |
fight, Fight, FIGHT. Actually the BBC Master 128 was probably the technically superior 8-bit computer, but that is at the end of the era, and I'll give you the SID chip  .Tom MMBasic for Linux, Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
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| RetroJoe Senior Member Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 290 |
Religious debates about the “best” 8-bit computer was part of the zeitgeist... even down to the CPU e.g. “everyone knows” that the Motorola 6809 had the best internal architecture :) Unfortunately, only the designers of the Tandy Color Computer figured that out. Waaay before “Windows or Mac” was the only game in town, everyone intuitively knew the market could not support dozens of incompatible architectures, so it was imperative that “your” platform become one of the post-shakeout winners. The Rule of 2+1 seems to be inviolable e.g. (Mac vs Windows) + Linux, (Xbox vs PlayStation) + Nintendo. I can’t really come up with an equation for the CMM2, though - depending on who you ask, it could be Arduino, Raspberry Pi, the Spectrum Next, retro emulators, the “X16” Project, etc. IMO, the Maximite platform occupies a very unique niche... which is nice :) Edited 2020-10-15 00:05 by RetroJoe Enjoy Every Sandwich / Joe P. |
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| CaptainBoing Guru Joined: 07/09/2016 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2170 |
pretty much spot-on with that assessment. In UK, the BBC was a top-end home micro with a top-end price. Most kids (for that is what drove the microcomputer explosion of the early 80s) were skint and the Sinclair machines (weird little oddballs tho' they were) was at least a computing platform, one that was open to people on low incomes - hence it's success. This resulted in a huge market and some of the stuff was pretty good - but if you look only at the sound/graphics most was rubbish even by the standards of the day. There was a morass of platforms between BBC and speccy, including the Amstrad CPC and the C64 plus a load of others that were arguable architecturally superior but just never caught on either through dreadful management or too late to the party... or politics... I did a lot of work with the Amstrad CPC. It was a stock Z80 platform and came with a very nice OS designed from the ground up to be extended either with your own m/c code or roms or whatever. We used to gut them and use them as embedded controllers for allsorts of stuff from Transformer testers to RADAR (yes really!) this last was sold well into double digits to Plessey for onward sale to the UK Met Office for sponsored sites all over the globe. It was the first system to generate PILOT/TEMP message at any point in the flight with auto balloon burst detect etc. but the likes of VIZ & Vaisala just cornered the market with years of free balloons/sondes/supplies and sold hundreds of *very* much more expensive systems that didn't really offer much more than the refurbished WF3 (which became WF33 and the WindProc/Meteoproc bolt on). Those were some great time to be working in the electronics biz (1984 to about 1990). *sigh*  |
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| thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4311 |
A great time to have been a kid too. Tom. MMBasic for Linux, Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
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| CaptainBoing Guru Joined: 07/09/2016 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2170 |
was kind of inevtable the Elite thing would rear its head... can anyone have a convo about the BBC micro without it? What is the statute of limitations on bragging rights? Prolly about the same as the English world cup squad and 1966  |
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| RetroJoe Senior Member Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 290 |
CaptainBoing, that's some pretty heady stuff with the radar instrumentation - I'm a big fan of "off-label" uses of technology. One of my professors (who happened to be British, and came of age during the heyday of British-led advances in radio and radar technology) used to say "A good engineer is someone who can build for a dime what any fool can build for a dollar" ! Tom, I do feel sorry for kids today - even that BBC Microbit is overly-sanitized and abstract... but certainly lightyears better than "consuming" games on an iPad! Apparently Eben Upton, the designer of the Raspberry Pi (another Brit - coincidence?) was motivated to fill the learning gap created by the over-consumerization of computers, but while the Pi is a great, versatile platform, it's not nearly as transparent as it could have been, IMHO i.e. with a more "bare metal" approach like the CMM2. Finally, I think learning to solder should be a mandatory skill, but I suppose school boards today are too afraid of the liability of 800F irons and solder fumes. I guess we can consider ourselves the "lucky ones", but it all started to go downhill with surface mount components. A boon for consumers, but for "makers", not so much :) I guess the hybrid approach (e.g. the Waveshare for the CMM2, passive breakout boards for SMC chips, etc) will be the way forward for the foreseeable future. Edited 2020-10-15 01:38 by RetroJoe Enjoy Every Sandwich / Joe P. |
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| matherp Guru Joined: 11/12/2012 Location: United KingdomPosts: 10310 |
The new Microbit processsor now has enough flash and ram to support MMBasic - well now....... |
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hitsware2 Guru Joined: 03/08/2019 Location: United StatesPosts: 719 |
!!!!! YES !!!!! The world is waiting for a BASIC to compete with PYTHON for ' development boards ' I . E . The board is seen by whatever P . C . it is plugged into as a USB drive with a main.bas file inside . The file can be edited with any text editor . Upon saving ( or restarting ) the code runs . Note : No terminal software or special IDE needed . my site |
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| CaptainBoing Guru Joined: 07/09/2016 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2170 |
That might interest @Nimue. They are already in the education thing and the micro-bit is already in the education thing... the power of even a micromite in the education thing would be helpful. You're a sucker for punishment Edited 2020-10-15 18:04 by CaptainBoing |
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| JoOngle Regular Member  Joined: 25/07/2020 Location: SwedenPosts: 82 |
Hardware support is the secret. You can have the best processor in the world, you can have a ton of memory...and it still would suck in comparison to a dedicated hardware processor for each function, such as sprites, graphics, sound etc. The C64 was a slow computer, with an inferior CPU, we all knew that - even when I was 13 years old and my friends had Sinclair Spectrum, Dragon 32 etc. Those all had faster and vastly superior processors. But what set it all apart was the HARDWARE sprites, hardware sound, and hardware scrolling capabilities of the C64. If you tried to compensate for that even with processors 8 times the speed of the 1 MHZ commodore 64, you still could not emulate the power of the 64 with it's 8 hardware sprites, SID chip and hardware scrolling. Same with the Amiga and the Atari, Atari ST was essentially the same computer as the Amiga, minus the bit-blitter in the beginning (it added blitting capabilities later on, but by then it was far too late). The Amiga had inferior sprite capabilities in comparison to the c64, but it had Bit-planes! Bit planes where graphical screens (kinda like giant hardware sprites if you like) where you could scroll them in any direction over each other without burdening the CPU (it was called the copper, co-processor) that also had blitting capabilities, but on separate bit-planes - awesome technology. This technology was very common in Arcade machines at the time, often way ahead of both the C-64 and Amiga, but far too expensive to make as a home computer. On the Arcade machines we called these Playfields and Player/missile objects (sprites essentially). The CMM2 doesn't have real hardware sprites, it has "coded" sprites, that doesn't even function the same way as real hardware sprites do. Real hardware sprites doesn't affect the main graphics memory in the slightest, it doesn't leave any trails of graphics OR scroll when the main memory scrolls or changes, because it's an hardware overlay. Bitplanes are kind of like sprites, but screens that can be overlayed or superimposed on top of each other with priority set. In Amiga's case, they could also be used to add more colors (and thus less independent layers) to combine as one big colorful layer that can be hardware scrolled in any direction. You could also separate the layers, and have them scroll in different directions, but then you got less colors. same with sprites, on the commodore 64 these where 24 x 21 pixels on a screen with a resolution of 320 x 256 arranged in a 8 + 8 + 8 bit data structure to form the pixels within the sprite memory. The sprites were addressable so they point at a certain memory address in the memory (I believe the CMM2 sprites also functions this way), but the CMM2 sprites aren't hardware sprites, so they are not "permanently" displayed on the screen regardless of the background, and they're "destructive" which means you need to copy the background to a page memory, place sprite, copy memory back to background and then place the new sprite position. Hardware sprites doesn't work that way, they are totally independent of the background and will not touch anything at all. This did present a dilemma - Sprite collision detection on the Commodore 64 was often flimsy and unreliable, so programmers had to get around this by making a character based matrix with an "invisible" character grid to track the sprites so proper collision detection could be performed. Personally I was lazy, so I did multiple collision "peeks" and requested collision data from the sprites several times in order to avoid the glitch, still glitchy, but easier than the aforementioned method. TL:DR above: Hardware support for graphics functions is what made the computers Amiga & Commodore 64 such a success. Software emulation, is really not the same. |
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Nimue Guru Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: United KingdomPosts: 420 |
It does... but... As someone who has used (or attempted to use) the Microbit for the past 3 years in the UK, it's not quite there. Granted there is now an ecosystem of sensors and development board stuff. Granted, you can program them in Scratch(ish) and microPython and Javascript. The genuine issue is that they need to be tethered to a PC to develop on them. You then "send" the code to the microbit and "hope" that it works. If it doesn't, you need the PC again to debug - but that debugging is offline. Tinker, upload, test. Having taught 100's of classes using the microbit, the majority of the time is spent upload the code and debugging, rather that coding to solve a problem. That said, some of the IOT shields for the microbit make it an interesting device for other than education - but at that point, you may aswell use a PiZero, or the mini Mite family. The CMM2 addresses all these shortcomings by being a genuine "power on and code" solution. I wish I had the funds and marketing savvy brain to help get this "little device than can" into schools across the land. In education circles, very often devices are sanitised and packaged for children - the MicroBit is one of those. Kids can and do see though "pseudo context" -- successful lessons are built around solving genuine problems - not making a cat bounce up and down on a screen (I call this the junk food of coding). My current "project" with the CMM2 involves the kids designing a control system for an aquarium -- test water temp, turn on / off a heater, test the clarity of the water, turn on / off the filter, test the pH (haven't got the sensor for that yet). Whilst all of that is possible with other kit - the CMM2's self contained nature makes it more "real" and the MMBasic makes the coding easy to explain and easy to code. (In fact the hardest part of the project is to design an attractive GUI to display the readings). None of these devices is perfect (for education) - but IMHO the CMM2 comes closest and an affordable price point. About the only suggestion I would have to make it "perfecter" would be a version integrated into a keyboard so it is literally power / monitor and go AND for us to figure out how to get wifi enabled SD cards to work. Both of these are not requests, nor digs at the devs of the CMM2 - lets not open that thread again. Do I need another device - no. What I need is for teachers to be upskilled sufficiently to realise that the CMM2 is there and offers more than other devices. As I said, without being patronising "CMM2, the little device that can". Good, wholesome thread!! Nim Entropy is not what it used to be |
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| JohnS Guru Joined: 18/11/2011 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4044 |
Would it be good/better/worse if it was in the monitor? I had a brief look at such cards. They appeared to come in different kinds and were not cheap. Is the price OK for school? Any particular ones you've used & were OK / avoided? It feels doable... John |
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| CaptainBoing Guru Joined: 07/09/2016 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2170 |
I did a PIC based controller for my 550ltr marine tank years ago. Was mainly concerned with balancing the levels between the sump and the main tank. Rocks coated in the biological film quite like to be exposed to air and then covered again, simulating tides. My sump did this with two pumps (wasn't gravity fed) and a weir in the sump... bed of "living sand", "living Rock", weeds, creatures etc. it worked really well. The controller besides the tides had to make sure the levels didn't end up flooding my living room in the event of a failure (including mains power) so that the tank siphoned through the pump, flooded the sump and then my floor. Worked really well until I decided the whole "scene" was just too much money and hassle. Having moved to MicroMites for all this sort of stuff, just recently (a year or so back) I designed & built a light panel for a customer. It simulates a day of tropical light (depends how it is set up really), from midnight to midnight using high power LEDs in combination to get a very realistic tropical light spectrum. As you point out the GUI is always a disproportionate amount of effort but I think my solution was OK. Two vids First the GUI Top right is a little mimic of the LEDs and the "graph" shows midnight to midnight with light intensity from top to bottom. Select the colour, draw the graph direct on the screen to set the levels. then A time-lapse of the finished product in action been running for a year now, just does it's thing with no problems. MicroMites are tough as bricks - they just do what they are supposed to and no dramas. The fish seem to like it too! Edited 2020-10-15 21:54 by CaptainBoing |
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| RetroJoe Senior Member Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 290 |
@JoOngle, I never owned an Amiga, but knew several people who did, and they always spoke about it in reverential terms. From what I gather, both the HW and the OS were brilliant. Regarding the “do it in hardware or software”, that’s arguably the single most important decision point of any design. My observation is that the trend is leaning dramatically toward “doing it in software” (including our beloved CMM2 :), driven by Moore’s Law and the push for ever-higher levels of abstraction for increased configuration flexibility e.g. virtualization, containerization, Software Defined Storage, Software Defined Networking, etc. One interesting trend along these lines has been the shift toward using GPUs instead of general-purpose CPUs for specific types of workloads like machine learning and Bitcoin mining. And we still have quantum computing to look forward to, as well as mass-market virtual reality (the release of the Oculus Quest 2 might be the tipping point). I think the CMM2 is our way to temporarily get off this crazy train of technology :) Enjoy Every Sandwich / Joe P. |
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| Nimue Guru Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: United KingdomPosts: 420 |
If it was in the monitor and the monitor could also be used as a standard VGA for computer use -- that would work also. The "issue" is that in most schools, plugging / unplugging / replugging IT equipment is frowned upon and in Primary its like asking for the next 7 years of male first borns -- anything to reduce that. This issue is not cost, its that such cards dont work with the CMM2 - I think across this board we have tried just about them all. In schools, x30 children , say sharing x5 (if your lucky)_- file management becomes an issue. Giving each child an SD card is one solution, sharing a card is the current solution but kiddos tend to delete (by mistake or on purpose) others work, copy / rename and generally cause havoc. A low brow soln would be a WifI SD card -- if they worked. I believe SDIO somewhere in the actual hardware is the issue -- so nothing that can be fixed by the team. Nim Entropy is not what it used to be |
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| RetroJoe Senior Member Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 290 |
@Nim, did you find those WiFi / BBS threads intriguing? E.g. a cheap PC or RPi in the classroom hosting “Maximite BBS” software + a cheap WiFi adapter for the CMM2 + the requisite terminal SW including a XMODEM-type (I.e. “lightweight”) file transfer protocol? Enjoy Every Sandwich / Joe P. |
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CircuitGizmos Guru Joined: 08/09/2011 Location: United StatesPosts: 1427 |
Or mounted on the back?   Micromites and Maximites! - Beginning Maximite |
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elk1984 Senior Member Joined: 11/07/2020 Location: United KingdomPosts: 228 |
MM Basic with its LOGO commands; Microbit powering a hardware Turtle.... Now there's Retro! |
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