/ microbit

BBC micro:bit - Gesture controlled blinking lights

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I've been tinkering with the new BBC micro:bit computer, especially the Micro Python editor Mu.

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I love how flexible the board is, especially for getting down to hacking in very little time.

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To test out the micro:bit I thought that I would write a simple script to blink the lights after the unit has been shaken.

Yes the micro:bit has an accelerometer that can be used to detect a gesture, such as a shake.

So with an LED attached to pin 0 and the Mu application loaded on my Linux machine, I wrote a few lines of code.

from microbit import *

def blinky():
    for i in range(10):
        pin0.write_digital(1)
        sleep(500)
        pin0.write_digital(0)
        sleep(500)
        
while True:
    if accelerometer.was_gesture("shake"):
        blinky()

I then clicked on Flash to write the code to my micro:bit and after a few moments I shook the board and triggered my LED to blink 10 times.