As mentioned last week, I have found a new way to provide a front end processor for my Pi, the BBC micro:bit. This week, I have started putting the new system through its paces: The microbit class in our GitHub repository has been beefed up to make it more resilient in the case where serial I/O is not initialised, or the MicroPython REPL is not running, and I have added a trivial Python program which can be used to intialise the REPL using the mu editor.
To test it all, I have revisited the Morse Code example, originally written to use GPIO support provided by Quick2Wire, to see if I could get it up and running with my new infrastructure. The micro:bit has a 5×5 LED display which makes the result a bit more impressive to look at:
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfGsSLEifAs[/embedyt]
The new code is significantly simpler than the original, for a couple of reasons:
- Making calls to the micro:bit API via MicroPython is easier than using GPIO via a C library.
- Version 15.0 of Dyalog APL contains new system functions for working with text files, so we no longer need the “Files” library, we can just use the built-in ⎕NGET function to read the contents of a file.
