Micro: bit and Calliope will open up endless possibilities. The more intensively one deals with these small computers, the faster new applications come to mind. Much of what had previously been associated with great effort is now relatively easy. This is mainly due to the fact that there is already a lot of functionality on these boards, which you only have to be connected externally to other components and systems.This book was created while working on a new Franzis Learning Package. In the end, there were just too many ...
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Micro: bit and Calliope will open up endless possibilities. The more intensively one deals with these small computers, the faster new applications come to mind. Much of what had previously been associated with great effort is now relatively easy. This is mainly due to the fact that there is already a lot of functionality on these boards, which you only have to be connected externally to other components and systems.This book was created while working on a new Franzis Learning Package. In the end, there were just too many projects, which would have increased the scope of this manual. So, all the projects that did not need much external hardware, were taken out and here published in advance. The Learning Package including the more hardware-related projects and the required material will follow a bit later and round off the topic.As accompanying material to this book here, there is a software archive with all source texts and the finished compiled hex files which you can just download and run. So, you can use these finished applications - even without having to worry about any software first. If people want to edit these programs, they can download source code.I hope you will have a lot of fun and success and enjoy this programming and experimenting!Burkhard Kainka http: //... Notes: When Burkhard Kainka offered me the opportunity to translate and publish his book, I was delighted. There are more than 1 million micro: bits out there, and with the German version Calliope this can only increase.There is much talk about "Getting People into Coding". Programming is not just for Programmers, but it is also a very good way to define "recipes". So, you have to define what you need, define a "cooking" sequence, try it out. If you try a recipe for the first time, chances are high, that you are not happy with the result - so some "debugging" is needed, and you try to cook it again, until you are happy with the result and this is your final version - job done.In many cases programming is described by programmers for programmers. This book tries to help by giving many examples.And as I went through the translation, I had to understand the scratch option as a first step. I assume this might probably be the same for many who start from scratch - sorry for the pun. As result I added a chapter and links where I thought it would help. I do have to admit, that I am a lover of the somehow special language Forth. 2018 included the celebration of 50 Years of Forth at Euroforth2018, with the inventor present. When I had the first micro: bit in my hand, I wanted to have a Forth version for this hardware as well running. I contacted Matthias Koch and asked him, if he could adapt his mecrisp Forth to this hardware. And as I had access to a second board at the time, I sent it to him. I was happy to hear that he would adapt his mecisp Forth. This happened a couple of years ago to the micro: bit. Now with Calliope available as well, the same should be possible.It turns out that the same code runs on both unchanged. Burkhard agreed to add this as an additional chapter. Juergen Pintaske, ExMark - April 2019
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