UK Made: CodeBug educational ‘thing’ gets Wi-Fi, a server, and much more

CodeBug Connect, is the IoT-capable next-generation of the original CodeBug educational board launched in 2015 – which won the Electronics Weekly Elektra Award that year for most innovative consumer product.

Retaining the original cartoon animal shape and small (~40 x 50mm) dimensions, the Connect version gains Wi-Fi and enough computing power to make it a wearable server and to host its own programming environment – the latter an on-board Python interpreter giving advanced users something beyond the original drag-and-drop-blocks programming environment, which is retained.

It also gets a full colour 5×5 LED grid, an accelerometer, three more processors (its a quad core hetrogeneous processor) and 4Mbyte of flash storage.

To make it more suitable for games, the original buttons have been upgraded to mini joysticks, while the touch-sensitive, croc-clippable legs that serve as I/O pins remain, as does the 0.1inch header socket.

“The technology in our original CodeBug has been used by over a million people to take their first steps in coding and electronics and we now want to allow people to do more,” said CodeBug engineering director Dr Andrew Robinson. “With CodeBug Connect, we wanted to make this technology accessible so everyone can build their own IoT devices and no one is left behind.”

Having far more processing power will allow CodeBug Connect to be used as an Internet radio, for speech recognition in a
wearable Alexa and for running machine learning or AI models for edge computing, said the company.

It can be reprogrammed in C or C++ and can use Arduino libraries and toolchain.

Sample applications include: an Internet connected quiz controller for fastest finger, a Twitter connected Christmas jumper, an Internet connected data logger for red squirrels and a skiing game interfaced with exercise equipment.

Further details so far are only available through a Kickstarter campaign.

“We’ve launched this morning on Kickstarter and are already nearly backed, which is nice as there’s been some hard engineering to shrink everything and make it easy for everyone to use,” Robinson told Electronics Weekly.

According to that campaign: “Even if you’re an established maker CodeBug Connect allows you to build projects faster. We’ve refactored Micropython to make it efficient and automatically sleep when required. For instance, our Pyiotos OS automatically handles switching to the best network, handling lost connections and reconnecting to WiFi so you can just focus on what you want to build.”

At a glance

5 x 5 RGB LED array
2x 5-way joysticks
Accelerometer
6x sewable and croc-clip-able leg loops
. 4x I/O including analogue and touch sense
. power plus ground
6 pin GPIO header (configurable UART, I²C, SPI, I²S or analogue audio out)
Quad core heterogeneous processor
4Mbyte flash
2.4GHz WiFi 802.11 b/n/g – station and soft AP (simultaneous)
0.8km wireless link to another CodeBug Connect (experimental)
UART terminal access over USB
Switching boost convertor for battery (JST PH connector)
Switching buck convertor from 5V USB
Custom event driven, MicroPython compatible, Pyiotos hybrid OS.
FAT file system on wear-levelled flash.
Built-in webserver.
OS re-flashable over USB, reprogrammable with C/C++ and optionally Arduino libraries
Self-hosted basic IDE for browsers with text editor and file browser with drag/drop transfer