Amazing new little device, and with it's much more powerful MCU (nRF52-series Cortex-M4 rather than the nRF51 Cortex-M0+) with 8x the RAM you can now even run small Machine Learning algorithms on it. Here it's responding to my voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNSKWdIxh8o&feature=emb_titl...

Is this achieving the goals of getting computing power into hands of kids ? I know they gave away a million a year or two ago, but my kids were more interested in raspberry pi as a platform - the micro-bit just kind of did not have the ... marketing ? appeal ? obvious way in ?

I like the idea - I can see some kind of path to free/open IoT devices and some standardisation. But ... is tehre some call home feature that says 'I have been turned on 5 times'?

Is this effective ?

I know I sound like an old moaner - it just is an important area - how do we measure if we are succeeding?

Cool! Refreshing with new hardware capabilities, and it seems they thought it through with the addition of a universal (yeah ...) hex format to support both v1 and v2 platforms from a single file.

The new nRF52833 MCU [1] seems pretty capable and certainly inline with what is being used in industry for suitable applications (it's an Cortex-M4 64 MHz, 128 KB RAM, 512 KB flash, Bluetooth) but it doesn't seem to have hardware support for any ML-specific stuff that I could see.

Oh, and there has been a keming accident on one of the images that is a bit unfortunate, the word "MakeCode" looks a great deal like "MaleCode" which is perhaps not optimal in their context [2].

[1] https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Low-power-short-range-wi...

[2] https://tech.microbit.org/docs/latest-revision/assets/blog/s...

Espruino (a JS interpreter for MCUs) runs really nicely on this too now - you get wireless programming and debug, and a full Bluetooth LE stack (you can run Web Bluetooth on the device and use to control other consumer electronics).

I'm very excited to see nrf52833's sweet new Bluetooth 5.2 capabilities made accessible to makers & learners. Would that more devices of all manners try to offer this kind of up-to-date bluetooth support!

Also, always good having another capable & affordable board show up on Zephyr IoT's supported boards list. Should hopefully happen fast! https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/arm/bbc_microbi...

Really enjoyed playing with the original micro:bit. Nice to see they are iterating on it.

Great announcement. Also great that the LED array in version 1 was empirically a success.

As frequently as Raspberry Pi devices are mentioned in comparison, there also mbed-style [1] inexpensive boards which support the "online compile and download to a virtual USB drive" model, and offer free RTOS support. (Perhaps these too -- or variants -- could hit a sweet spot in educational contexts which Raspberry Pi could miss.)

[1] https://os.mbed.com/platforms/

Edit: micro:bit is included there as an mbed-compatible device: https://os.mbed.com/platforms/Microbit/ . So presumably one can also practice RTOS for IoT on a micro:bit .

Very nice. Does this mean that micropython will be able to do bluetooth now? The extra flash memory will be a boost for sensor-based datalogging, if only you could write to files in append mode. Is the updated micropython source tree for this available anywhere yet?

Very cool. Does it include battery charging/management yet? That's a complicated thing to make and it seems like a pretty important feature if you want to allow people to make cool battery powered devices.

I have made some projects with my daughter using the micro:bit with the Scratch programming interface.

We have also done a few projects using the Microsoft interface and the cutebot addition to have fun making a track following robot.

I could see voice control being a really cool feature for kids to have fun with.

I hope they offer some additional interfaces in Scratch to support some of these new features.

Does anyone have any idea when this new version will be for sale?

WiFI would have been awesome! I love the accessibility of this thing, and it’s a great place to get started for hardware enthusiasts since you can drag drop in the browser.

You could totally build a guitar tuner with the latest version

Use microbit fir my weather station but as said you need other parts. It is easier than pi/arduino or the fpga I used as well. Not sure I will invest (my time) more though.

Isn't this a competitor with the Raspberry PI - who had the same goals? And this was sponsored by the BBC (i.e. via licence payers money). And free devices given to children. Shoudln't the BBC worked with the Raspberry PI foundation (charity) and given Raspberry Pis to children? Also the investment spent in making the PI not 'overwhelming' - which my 9 year old says it isn't (btw).

Cool, just yesterday my son tried a little bit of coding and was disappointed that the micro:bit had no speaker. So this upgrade is very welcome.

This is cool and all but let's take a step back.. what can this thing do that much more powerful computers and smartphones can't? If the answer is "nothing", perhaps they are just producing unnecessary litter?