Inspiration

We aim to bring greatest impact to education sector worldwide, using courier API and micro:bit. Also open up a lot of room of automation, for everything micro:bit can do, now you can add a SMS/email message on top.

What it does

It send Email, SMS and more, using micro:bit and mobile phone. Both are available in classroom, so schools no need to prepare extra hardwares. Possible and straight forward usages include send notifications for plant status, room temperatures, sounds, drop of object or person, etc. While it will have more fun to play real time games on micro:bits, it uses "Lists" api to simulate a game room and the mobile side can subscribe to the list in order to interact via push notifications .

Besides using mobile phone as bridge, windows and macOS bridge is also coming.

How we built it

We use mobile phone to implement the Courier.com API and build a micro:bit bluetooth connection to interact with the mobile phone.

Challenges we ran into

The memory limit of micro:bit is very low, so we have to shift a lot of complicated logics to the mobile side and keep the BLE protocol very simple. Recommend to use micro:bit version 2+, or may not have room for your code code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully send email and SMS directly from micro:bit; and also play a real time 2 player shooting game on such a small chip, and we have built a rare pxt extension that do not require hardware extension, which also means it is compatible with most hardware extensions. ( you can only plug the bit into either a car or a robot, but not both. while we don't occupy any pin nor slots )

What we learned

details in courier.com API, we dig into different areas such as email, SMS, push notifications, also learnt to build pxt extensions and the mobile bluetooth API