Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

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Microcontroller vs CPU Updated 2025-08-08

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Micro Bit simulator Updated 2025-07-16

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Micro Bit getting started Updated 2025-07-16

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When plugged into Ubuntu 22.04 via the USB Micro-B the Micro Bit mounts as:

/media/$USER/MICROBIT/

e.g.:

/media/ciro/MICROBIT/

for username ciro.

Loading the program is done by simply copying a .hex binary into the image e.g. with:

cp ~/Downloads/microbit_program.hex /media/$USER/MICROBIT/

The file name does not matter, only the .hex extension.

The back power light flashes while upload is happening.

Flashing takes about 10-15 seconds for the 1.8 MB scroll display hello world from microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/v1.0.1/tutorials/hello.html:

from microbit import *
display.scroll("Hello, World!")

and the program starts executing immediately after flash ends.

You can restart the program by clicking the reset button near the USB. When you push down the program dies, and it restarts as soon as you release the button.

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Compile MicroPython code for Micro Bit locally Updated 2025-07-27

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To use a prebuilt firmware, you can just use uflash, tested on Ubuntu 22.04:

git clone https://github.com/bbcmicrobit/micropython
cd micropython
git checkout 7fc33d13b31a915cbe90dc5d515c6337b5fa1660
uflash examples/led_dance.py

What that does is:

convert the MicroPython code to bytecode
join it up with a prebuilt firmware that ships with uflash which contains the MicroPython interpreter
flashes that

To build your own firmware see: Compile MicroPython code for Micro Bit locally on Ubuntu 22.04 with your own firmware

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Program the Micro Bit in C Updated 2025-07-27

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stackoverflow.com/questions/73877965/how-to-compile-c-c-code-into-a-hex-file-for-the-bbc-microbit

Official support is abysmal, very focused on MicroPython and their graphical UI.

The setup impossible to achieve as it requires setting up the Yotta, just like the impossible to setup Compile MicroPython code for Micro Bit locally on Ubuntu 22.04 with your own firmware setup.

So we just use github.com/lancaster-university/microbit-samples + github.com/carlosperate/docker-microbit-toolchain:

docker pull ghcr.io/carlosperate/microbit-toolchain:latest
git clone https://github.com/lancaster-university/microbit-samples
cd microbit-samples
git checkout 285f9acfb54fce2381339164b6fe5c1a7ebd39d5

# Select a sample, builds one at a time. The default one is the hello world.
cp source/examples/hello-world/* source

# Build and flash.
docker run -v $(pwd):/home --rm ghcr.io/carlosperate/microbit-toolchain:latest yotta build
cp build/bbc-microbit-classic-gcc/source/microbit-samples-combined.hex "/media/$USER/MICROBIT/"

.hex file size for the hello world was 447 kB, much better than the MicroPython hello world downloaded from the website which was about 1.8 MB!

If you try it again for a second time from a clean tree, it fails with:

warning: github rate limit for anonymous requests exceeded: you must log in

presumably because after Yotta died it started using GitHub as a registry... sad. When will people learn. Apparently we were at 5000 API calls per hour. But if you don't clean the tree, you will be just fine.

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Yotta (build system) Updated 2025-07-27

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Dead:

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Micro Bit version Updated 2025-07-16

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Identification: kitronik.co.uk/blogs/resources/explore-micro-bit-v1-microbit-v2-differences The easiest thing is perhaps the GPIO notches.

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nRF51 series Updated 2025-07-16

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Micro Bit example Updated 2025-07-16