Teacher feedback drove this release: more inputs for MicroPython lessons, access to the on-board sensors, and more pins. All three arrived, along with a rebuilt Inspector for all 99 parts in the catalog.

Drive the micro:bit's sensors by hand

Select a micro:bit and open the new Sensors tab. The Motion card is a 3D board you drag to tilt and roll, with X, Y, Z sliders in milli-g that stay in sync. Orientation chips (Face up, Face down, Tilt left, Tilt right, Logo up, Logo down) animate the board into a pose and hold the gesture the way real hardware would, while Shake and Freefall fire one-shot events; Freefall drops the board off-screen and bounces it back, which is more fun than it has any right to be. Compass is a draggable rose with a heading readout, and Light level and Temperature use the same gauges as the circuit environment, because they are the circuit environment: the LDR on your breadboard sees the same lux you give the micro:bit.

More pins when you need them

The micro:bit's five edge pads are faithful to the real thing and immediately limiting, also faithful to the real thing. A Breakout board toggle in the Inspector docks the board into an edge-connector breakout that adds P8, P12, P13, P14, P15, and P16 in one pad row. The original pads keep their wires when you toggle, the six new pins are digital-only exactly as on a real V1, and the toggle politely refuses to undock while wires are still attached to breakout-only pads.

An ultrasonic distance sensor

The Ultrasonic Distance Sensor (HC-SR04) joins the Inputs group: VCC, TRIG, ECHO, GND, wide-supply so 3.3 V boards and 5 V Arduinos can both drive it directly. Its Inspector card is a draggable ruler from 2 to 400 cm with an out-of-range switch for testing timeouts. The physics is the real protocol: pulse TRIG, and ECHO answers with a width of 58 microseconds per centimetre, so machine.time_pulse_us on a micro:bit measures 580 µs at 10 cm exactly as the datasheet promises.

An Inspector you can read

Every part's panel was rebuilt: plain-English property labels instead of raw parameter keys, help text where a row needs it, rarely-touched settings folded into an Advanced section, and the part's proper catalog name in the header. Kind-specific control cards moved above the properties: value chips on resistors and capacitors, a rotary knob with a linear/log taper picker on potentiometers, an I-V curve on diodes, colour swatches on LEDs that set forward voltage with the colour, a waveform picker on the signal generator that shows only the settings that waveform uses, and live-resistance readouts on the LDR and thermistor cards. The MCU Code tab was restacked so it stays usable in a narrow panel, and its editor follows your light or dark theme.

Fixes and improvements

• Palette search now matches names, categories, keywords, and descriptions, so "sonar", "range finder", and "ultrasonic" all find the HC-SR04.
• Potentiometer, Trimmer, LDR, and Thermistor are cross-listed under Inputs while browsing.
• The Inspector tab strip scrolls horizontally instead of clipping at minimum panel width.

Sensor APIs and the breakout pinout are documented at docs.devoltapp.com/parts/microbit, and the HC-SR04 page at docs.devoltapp.com/parts/sensors.