bodner058

"We wouldn't have Python on the micro:bit if he hadn't made it work, to put it simply," Nicholas Tollervey says. He's talking about Damien George, the physicist and engineer behind MicroPython , the Python interpreter for microcontrollers. George began his project to build a Python interpreter for microcontrollers in 2013. "I started writing MicroPython to see if it's possible," he says. "Could I shrink Python down small enough to run on these tiny chips?" From scratch, he made a Python compiler so skinny it could squeeze into 128 kilobytes of RAM, and then wrote the runtime and built-in functions. "After about 6 months I realized it was possible, and I had a proof of concept." Damien George, PSF Community Service Award recipient Surprisingly, MicroPython is based not on the CPython code, but on the documentation. "I tried to look as little as possible at CPython's implementation," he says. "I'd say 95% of t...

Today, March 22nd, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) begin to deliver 1 million small programmable devices to the UK's 11 and 12 year old children. The aim is to inspire a new generation of digital creators. The device is called a BBC micro:bit and, among other things, it runs MicroPython . Tomorrow's the day when the #bbcmicrobit arrives in pupils hands. pic.twitter.com/XnJVYc4bME Get ready to write the future #microbit — BBC Make It Digital (@BBCMIDigital) March 21, 2016 The device is about the size of a credit card, comes in different colours and consists of a couple of buttons, a 5x5 LED matrix, I/O pins, an accelerometer, compass, ARM processor, micro-USB port, battery connector and BLE. Over the coming weeks all the software and hardware plans needed to recreate the project will be released under an open license. If you have the time and money, you could fork this work and make your own. Since the project's inception, the Python Software Foundation has be...