University of Cambridge theoretical physicist Damien George has built a tiny microcontroller that is more powerful than Arduino and far simpler than the Raspberry Pi. Just funded on Kickstarter ...

The official micro python board includes a micro SD card slot, 4 LEDs, a switch, a real-time clock, an accelerometer and has plenty of I/O pins to interface many peripherals.

Pyboard micro-controllers are aimed at developers who know Python, the world's third most popular language behind Java and JavaScript, which is sweeping the developer world right now.

The Micro Python variant of Python 3 is a from-scratch reimplementation of the language in C, not simply a port of the original CPython implementation of Python.

Developers by no means are stuck with these two boards, but to really customize whatever the hardware that Micro Python will run on, developers need to understand a little bit about what is happening ...

The differences between the Python and MicroPython programming languages are minute, but they make a powerful difference.