bbcmicrobit / hardware

Hardware designs for the BBC micro:bit

BBC micro:bit

Open hardware designs

This repository contains the schematics and bill of materials for the BBC micro:bit.

Technical documentation for the BBC micro:bit

The main technical documentation for the BBC micro:bit lives at the micro:bit Tech Site. On that site, you will find details about the way the micro:bit works, a reference-design based on the micro:bit, as well as a detailed walk-through of the schematic contained in this repository.

• Overview of the hardware.
• Walk-through of the schematic.
• A reference-design based on the micro:bit which includes layout and gerbers and is based on a module for easy fabrication.

Licensing

These files are subject to copyright, and are licensed to you according to certain conditions that you must adhere to if you wish to do anything which means redistributing them in whole or part, including derived versions.

The copyright holder is the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

These are made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

This means that:

• This is not a transfer of copyright. This license means that you, and anyone else who adheres to it, may use the licensed materials in ways which copyright law normally prevents you from doing—provided you don’t breach the terms.
• You may incorporate these files into your own products, commercial or not.
• You must properly credit the BBC as a copyright holder.
• You must not misrepresent the origin of these files (for example by claiming that you created them when you did not).

Note that this only a brief summary: for the full licensing conditions, you must read the licence. In the event that this document and the licence disagree, the licence takes precedence (please file a bug report if this is the case!)

Trademarks (including the micro:bit logo) are licensed separately under different terms.

Versions

There are three versions of the BBC micro:bit board that have been produced, V1.3 and V1.5 and V2. V1.5 was created to address the end-of-life of the micro:bit's motion sensors.

There are more details about the V1.5 revision on the micro:bit Knowledge Base motion sensor revision article.

The micro:bit V2 open source hardware which contains the schematics and bill of material can be found here

Differences from manufactured BBC micro:bits

These versions differ slightly from that used in manufacturing the original micro:bit, in that trademarks (which are licensed separately) have been removed.

hardware's Issues

no pcb doc

The hardware documentation only shows the diagram of circuits, BOM but does not document unknown possibilities in the test points of the PCB

Why no vias to opposite pins

Who in their right minds decided to plate both sides of the edge connector, yet only route signals to the front half. Really genius design on the behalf of the folks at BBC. Thanks for wasting my money & several hours of my life on designing and manufacturing a PCB that now does not work because the edge connector only works on way around.

Idea for version 2.0, spend 20 seconds adding vias to the top of the connector to the bottom 😠

Schematics for new version 1.5 when?

Schematics for new version 1.5

Schematics are for previous version 1.3 while current version is 1.5.

Please provide the schematics for current version 1.5.

See micro:bit motion sensor hardware change.

Thank you!

Micro Bit V2.0: Request hardware schematic pdf file

Signed-off-by: Lingao Meng [email protected]