BBC’s Micro:bit turns out to be an excellent drone hijacking tool The BBC’s Micro:bit computer board may be winning over school kids, but hackers have found its wireless capabilities and programmable nature make it an excellent tool for mischief. In a presentation at this year's DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas on Friday, Damien Cauquil, senior security researcher at Econocom Digital …
A micro:bit running Python is a very constrained device. Most of its available memory is taken up by the Python interpreter leaving only a few thousand bytes for the text of the source program.
Things are better when programming in C where there is more memory available but a Pi Zero W would be a much more capable device.
The usual (arm) python2.7 executable weighs in at 3.1M, plus another 800K of C libraries. I have another 60M python libraries, but that could easily get trimmed. The source code for your python script is not stored in the micro:bit at all. Some compiled and optimised binary gets stored in flash along with a drastically trimmed python run-time and some device driver libraries. The run-time and device drivers will eat into the 16K of ram but as you do not store any source code in ram, you have a chunky library and hefty CPU, you are still way better off than you were with a ZX81 and a wobbly ram pack.
The source code for your python script is not stored in the micro:bit at all.
I suggest you have a read of the following and also take a look at the downloadable .hex file...
http://tech.microbit.org/software/micropython
"When you write your Python application, both the web hosted editor and the offline editor Mu create a modified .hex file for you to copy to the micro:bit. This modified file contains 3 things ... 3) A verbatim copy of your Python program, complete with comments and any spaces."
https://support.microbit.org/support/solutions/articles/19000044768--hex-file-format
"MicroPython builds take a firmware.hex image (the MicroPython pre-compiled image) and append your script to the end of it, in a fixed 8K region at a known address."
PS: MicroPython is based on Python 3.
Pi's can run perfectly well on battery power (6aa batteries will get you well over 12 hours use including always on wifi and bluetooth, a phone charging pack will last much much longer even when powering various USB devices from the pi and handily has usb ports for easy power supply).
Wall wart aint needed.
I got a USB 'charger' battery for running my Pi3 and Touch screen. Wired up a zero W for amusement and it was still going a week later.
The micro:bit would have been good a few years ago but the zero is miles ahead of it. Having said that you can program the micro:bit to write rude words in the air as you spin it round on a piece of string.
"Having said that you can program the micro:bit to write rude words in the air as you spin it round on a piece of string."
What a lovely idea. The possibility of taking someone's eye out with a well-chosen expletive means it might make a nice Code Club exercise. (Always assuming that it isn't already.)
I'm doing the same with a v1 Pi and v1 touchscreen for fun. But hit a lot of roadblocks as it's the early hardware and I can do zero programming/scripting.
So for now it is just a fun little mp3 player.
For anything that meeds singular or basic function something like an arduino or bbc microbit is better. As these are microcontroller based and have no os headroom needed.
Thank you Lysenko, my point exactly.
A Pi is overkill, and over consumption. Strip it down to what you actually need, and the power consumption drops along with it (who would have guessed eh?).
Result, *much* smaller toys of naughtiness.
/me doesn't dare mention what you can get up to with an ATtiny.
As you say, an ATtiny and similar can do wonders for most simple projects needing to sense or control one or two things only.
Anything more complicated, net connections etc, and going the Pi route gives you lots of easy connectability. Some of it can be done with microcontrollers, but then you are committing to lots of additional boards, and basically building your own Pi! :D
Oh, and the downvotes on my previous post, I assume is for mentioning the Pi has an OS overhead? Which I'd assume it does if people run natively Noobs or similar, but will not if running something else (I know there are lots of options)?
Downvotes on here are an odd thing.
I just remember you can only please all of the people some of the time. That and some people are arses all of the time ;-)
You are of course correct. 99% of Pi projects are python scripts running under Linux. Which adds a whole load of code overhead. When it's a box on your desk this isn't really an issue, and does make a lot of things much easier.
However, if you're trying to build something self contained and with the longevity of an elephant instead of a mayfly, you need to lose a lot of dead wood.
If you're still measuring your power consumption in milliamps, you're not even in the same ball-park as what you can get up to with a proper low power device.
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