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So when will we get the Star Trek Tricorder then?

A competition has been announced with a $10m prize for the first working medical tricorder. If you claim to be an engineer and don't know what I'm talking about, then may I suggest locking yourself in a room with a DVD box set of the original Star Trek TV series. Don't come out until you can describe in detail the operation of Inertial Dampers and Transporter Pattern Buffers. You may now justifiably call yourself an engineer and embark upon this $10m quest. Seriously, what did inspire my generation of school kids to take up electronics? It certainly wasn't school: UK grammar schools in the 1960's didn't teach it. Technical High schools did and turned out students with A-levels in Engineering which provided exemptions from some subjects in the first year at university! Naturally these schools were all shut down because they were deemed too expensive. When the IT revolution began in the 1980’s UK schools were ill-equipped to meet the challenge.

Mars rover Curiosity

The recent discovery by the government that IT (or ICT) education in UK schools tends to be limited to Microsoft Office products, coincided with the launch of the Raspberry Pi computer board. Suddenly the media latch onto this Linux board as an answer to the problem of our kids' loss of interest in the subject. It should be pointed out that the original driver behind the ‘Pi was to provide cheap but powerful hardware to schools in countries rich in keen students and motivated staff, but poor in equipment. In the UK we have a different challenge and I’m afraid it’s not a lack of computing hardware. Nevertheless let’s take a closer look at Raspberry Pi and some alternatives and see if they have the potential to stimulate interest.

The ‘Pi in many ways is just like any other microprocessor development board in the RS catalogue. At its heart is a microprocessor featuring what is rapidly becoming inevitable: an ARM processor core. The Broadcom BCM2835 chip uses an ARM 11 variant, the ARM1176JZF-S. Are young Johnny and his mate sitting there texting each other across the table looking inspired? Ummm, not yet. OK well they should be, because it’s quite remarkable to get this much computing power for about 20 GBP.

The ARM 11 represents serious muscle with a 32-bit instruction set, 16-bit Thumb instructions for more efficient use of code space and OMG! Jazelle technology providing, in effect, a hardware bytecode interpreter for Java-based programs. Hm, no signs of interest yet. The Broadcom chip features something else though: a very powerful multimedia processor unit. Take this chip and add 256Mbytes of RAM, video, audio, HDMI and Ethernet connectors and you have a tiny board capable of running some sophisticated gaming software under Linux. Ah, I’ve got their attention now. The trouble is, unless they can teach themselves to program it, how are they going to learn with so few teachers qualified to the right level? It is possible to teach yourself, but you tend to develop bad programming habits which can cause all sorts of trouble later, unless you have had guidance from an expert from the start. Besides, there is more to computer life than gaming: there’s the huge embedded world. The ‘Pi is not the ideal board for embedded development which often involves interfacing to sensors and actuators (motors). For this reason, unless you have the necessary expertise at school to exploit the power of the ‘Pi, I would instead recommend the mbed processor module. Oh dear, the lads have gone back to Tweeting on their phones. More valuable network bandwidth being used for informing their followers when they got out of bed this morning. Guys, when you ‘grow up’, wouldn’t you rather design the next must-have gadget, or develop the control system that makes your car drive itself or see a robot you helped design explore another planet? The mbed may not be as cool as the ‘Pi but consider this: it too has an ARM-core processor chip and plugs into your PC. All the software development tools are free and on-line. You can develop and program code into the mbed module anywhere you can get an Internet connection. The mbed website works as a social network and provides instant access to other scarily clever people working on innovative projects. There are two flavours of mbed now: the original based on the ARM Cortex-M3 and the new Cortex-M0. I would suggest the former for education purposes as it is far more powerful, has the necessary interfaces to drive motors and a lot more communication features.

Dare I say it, there is another option that many schools will be familiar with: LEGO Mindstorms. It has heavy educational support from LEGO and, you guessed, the controller box is built around another ARM-core chip! Brilliant educational tool, but may suffer from a lack of ‘coolness’ amongst teenagers. Dammit, now where’ve they gone? Back to the games console. Oh well, I don’t claim to be an inspirer of teenagers – now, that tricorder: how hard could it be?

I expect (hope) to get lots of comments from outraged educators in response to this blog. If you are an ICT teacher/lecturer reading this then, you are obviously already inspiring your students. In which case we definitely want to hear from you! Tell us at DesignSpark what projects you’re working on and if there’s anything we at RS can do to make your task easier.

If you're stuck for something to do, follow my posts on Twitter. I link to interesting new electronics components and development kits (some of them available from my employer!) and retweet posts I spot about robot, space exploration and other issues.

Engineer, PhD, lecturer, freelance technical writer, blogger & tweeter interested in robots, AI, planetary explorers and all things electronic. STEM ambassador. Designed, built and programmed my first microcomputer in 1976. Still learning, still building, still coding today.
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