Controlling Blender using BBC micro:bit

I have been following the news about BBC micro:bit, a microcontroller that can be programmed using Blocks (Microsoft MakeCode), Python and Scratch.

Last week I received my micro:bit Go bundle that I ordered from Adafruit Industries, and one of my projects was to connect micro:bit to Blender using serial port communication.

You can see a demo of it in action in the video below.


And the source code for receiving and processing the information in Blender is at ops/hardware/microbit/op_modal_timer_microbit_serial_comm.py

In order for the code above to work, you need to install the pyserial module for your Blender installation. On my windows setup, I ran the following command to install pyserial.

C:\\blenderdev\2.83\python\bin>python -m pip install pyserial
Collecting pyserial  
Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/0d/e4/2a744dd9e3be04a0c0907414e2a01a7c88bb3915cbe3c8cc06e209f59c30/pyserial-3.4-py2.py3-none-any.whl (193kB)    
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 194kB 10.6MB/s                                                                                                            
Installing collected packages: pyserial                                                                                                                               
Successfully installed pyserial-3.4


I cannot wait to explore my micro:bit and figure out how I can integrate it with Blender (amongst other things).

Thank you for reading my blog.
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Satish Goda
@satishgoda