Micro:bit Bluetooth Low Energy Hacking Persistence (High School Internship Project)

Question

My project is to create an interactive program using the Micro:bit microprocessor I'm building a game which uses a drill motor as a controller of sorts reading the rotation direction and speed as inputs for control but my mentor also said it would be cool to power the board at the same time as the game is running so now I hit the situation where once I stop turning to change direction or my speed goes below transmitting 3.3 volts to power it then the game restarts and I lose all progress

I had the Idea of using a second micro:bit as a sort of storage place being powered by my computer and the two continuously communicating sending back player position and other objects on the LED's

but i can't figure out how to get the two Micro:bit's to talk to each other

If someone could just point me in the right direction or even set up some sort of communication to nudge me in the right direction as I start moving forward

i'm a high school student who doesn't know as much as I pretend to so I'll probably need a lot of help (i am more advanced then most in my class at this sort of thing so think of me as a tech gifted teenager thrown in with college students losing my undeserved ego day by day LOL) please help me somehow I'm currently completely lost

Answer 1

You won't be able to use Bluetooth for the reasons indicated in the documentation (not enough memory): http://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ble.html

However, there is an incoming implementation of the lighter radio module, which would allow you to send simple data: https://github.com/bbcmicrobit/micropython/pull/283

The proposed documentation can be found in: https://github.com/bbcmicrobit/micropython/pull/305

As you can see in GitHub, at the time of writing it has not yet been merged into micropython. So if you'd like to try it you would have to clone the repository, apply the patch and build it from source. Keep in mind there is risk for the API to change, as there are still discussions about it.

Alternatively, as Sean has mentioned, you can use the C++ DAL implementation of the radio module to get something running on the meantime. Or if you prefer, the blocks and touch develop languages also offer radio functionality.