What is a microcontroller?

Microcontrollers are small computers on a single chip. They usually include a CPU, memory, and input/output peripherals. They will have more limited computing resources than what might be found on a modern PC.

Compared to a PC, however, they can be made to a much smaller dimension, allowing them to be embedded in all sorts of electronic and mechanical devices. Their power consumption is often far less in orders of magnitude, thus providing battery life for days. They have a much lower cost per unit, which opens up possibilities of having hundreds of such devices to collect sensor data across a broad geographical area and still be financially feasible.

Traditionally, it was a difficult process to create applications on microcontrollers because you would have to write very low-level code that took time and was difficult to debug. MicroPython brings the ease of use of Python to microcontroller. It's able to provide this easier interaction with the hardware, and yet still work in such a resource constrained environment and provide a wide range of functionality with a strong level of responsiveness.