University of Cambridge theoretical physicist Damien George has built a tiny microcontroller that is more powerful than Arduino and far simpler than the Raspberry Pi. Just funded on Kickstarter, the £24 board runs an adapted version of Python known as Micro Python and will allow users to simply paste lines of text code onto the board to make it work. "The board has a USB port which allows you to easily connect it to a PC. You don't need any software to program it: it behaves like a USB flash drive, and you just copy a Python text file to it and it runs," George explains. Other features of the board, which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, include a micro SD card slot, two buttons, 4 LEDs, 30 input/output pins for interfacing with sensors, a real-time clock, an accelerometer for sensing angles, and output lines to control servo motors used in robotics.
The idea for a simple Python microcontroller came to George while he was building a walking robot. "I needed something very small, but powerful -- something with a lot of input and output lines that was able to precisely control motors for the robot's joints," he says.
Since Python is a widely-used programming language for both beginners and experts, he decided to shrink it down so that it could run on a low-powered chip with limited memory. "Unlike the Raspberry Pi, the Micro Python board allows you easy access to the bare-metal of the hardware, which means you can do time-critical operations without worrying about an operating system getting in your way," George says.
The USB feature of the board allows it to be configured as a human interface device, so you can hook up any type of object or sensor and turn it into a mouse, keyboard or game-pad that controls your computer. A few lines of Python code could read the accelerometer and make the LEDs blink depending on the angle of the board. The board also directly powers and controls four motors. "You can use two of them to make a pan and tilt mechanism, for example, to aim a webcam. Or you could make a wheeled robot with two continuous rotation servos, and one tilt servo for its head," says George.
The project has raised about £40,000 more than its original goal so far, with time left on Kickstarter. George will use the money to make the board Wi-Fi- and Ethernet-ready and plans to ship roughly 2,000 units, which will be produced in the UK, to backers in March 2014.
The next step is to release the software under the MIT open-source license, meaning anyone can modify and use the code. "I hope that Micro Python will be running on lots of different hardware, taking advantage of all the existing sensors and actuators to be used in a variety of new ways ," George says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
