Faraday micro:bit challenge The Travel Companion Faraday micro:bit challenge

What is a travel companion? A travel companion is a device that can tell you the temperature, compass direction, different currencies and the time differences in 5 different places. Also we programmed the micro:bit to work as a step-o-meter to count your steps, for this you would need to buy a buzzer and two crocodile clips to connect the buzzer to the pins on the micro:bit. This product aimed for people who travel a lot or have family who live abroad as they would benefit more from it. This is programmed to help lots of people and be useful in the real world. We have designed this product using our STEM knowledge and understanding of computer programming.

Market research Most popular holiday destinations & Time difference from GMT Paris: +1 hour Kenya: +2 hours Tenerife: 0 New York: -5 hours Rio De Janeiro: -4 hours Benidorm: +1 hours Crete: +2 hours Italy: +1 hour Most popular currencies US Dollar (USD) Euro (EUR) British Pound (GBP) Japanese Yen (JPY) Canadian Dollar (CAD) Chinese Yuan (CNY)

Themes There are 4 different themes to choose from they are travel, sport, home and leisure and health. We have chosen the theme of travel, this is because over 50% of Brits go on holiday abroad each year and more and more people are traveling to different places. The travel companion also fits into the heath and sports categories as we have included a stepometer.

Price Guide Micro bit starter set, includes battery pack = £15.00 (all ready provided) 2 x crocodile clips = £0.50 1 piezo buzzer = £2.00 TOTAL COST = £17.50 SALE PRICE= £22.50 PROFIT= £5.00 If we were in the real world you would also need to cover the cost of the programmers and the manufacturers wages. With any profits that we would make we would invest it to improve the product further. We have spent a total of £2.50 of our budget.

Coding

Challenges we have faced One of the first problems we came across was the fact we lost all our coding after each session, so only the micro:bit had any of our work on. With the step-o- meter programming it to have an output from one of the pins was the most challenging part of the coding. We also had some difficulties with coding the currency changes because we had to code a lot of features. The buzzer wasn’t working at all for the step-o-meter. Top tips from the micro:bit team: The .hex files you compile can be stored like any other file, so you can keep track of scripts you’ve made You can open .hex files in My Scripts! Click on ‘Create Code’ and then ‘Import Code’.

How we overcame our problems We overcame our loss of coding by taking a screenshot of our codes. This enabled us to save our work and not having to start from scratch. Eventually, we managed to fix the output from one of the pins. We also managed to fix the currency converter because we abbreviated the names of currency, for example pounds became ‘PO’. We overcame the buzzer problem by using our STEM technology and found a solution.

Conclusion We have worked together as a team and have programmed a product that we can all be proud of. We have all worked together as a team and got further than we ever imagined, facing problems along the way. Using our scientific, technological, engineering and mathematical skills we have used our time productively to make a positive invention that can help people in the real world. We have used our wider STEM skills like thinking mathematically to not pass the budget and calculating the profit as well.