AVR Freaks

In the examples take a look at the "invaders" for example. It's even spawning three threads of execution so there's clearly an RTOS buried in there too.

 

That's what I wanted to get away from - the whole thing (even just the Lancaster HAL layer) is elevating it to at least the level of Arduino abstraction and possibly even beyond. So if you wanted to light just one of those 25 LEDs in that 5x5 matrix it's not clear how something so "low level" would be achieved. Digging through the code it appears there's one 32 bit port with 5 row and 5 column connnections and an LED is lit at the interception of the two. But that suggests time based multiplexing which then raises the question of what they are doing about current limiting. Does the display() method in the HAL rely on the "animation timer" never stopping/pausing and does the smoke escape if that happens?

 

I begin to wonder about the merits of this thing. The idea from the BBC is to make a whole new generation "computer literate" but offering Lego Next or Arduino style programming (or something even higher level) isn't really preparing a next engineering generation. For a long time to come MCUs are still going to be programmed in C/C++ and setting bits in IO etc.

 

In fact I am still a great fan of the learning route of transistor->gate->half-adder->full-adder->ALU->MPU->MCU with some Asm and C at the lowest level thrown in. I know C++ and Java is all about abstraction and re-use but someone still needs to be available to implement the foundations on which such schemes are based.

http://tech.microbit.org/hardwar...

 

This pages says:

The schematic will be kept in version control in the micro:bit GitHub account. It will be released by the BBC once final sign-off around license terms has completed.

So I guess we're saying the BBC has not "signed off" yet ?

 

However it was worth googling to that page as it told me things about the LED array (for example) I did not know.