Direction

There is a compass on the BBC micro:bit. If you ever make a weather station use the device to work out the wind direction.

Compass

It can also tell you the direction of North like this:

from microbit import *

compass.calibrate()

while True:
    needle = ((15 - compass.heading()) // 30) % 12
    display.show(Image.ALL_CLOCKS[needle])

You must calibrate the compass before taking readings. Failure to do so will just produce garbage results. The calibration method runs a fun little game to help the device work out where it is in relation to the Earth’s magnetic field.

The program takes the compass.heading and, using some simple yet cunning maths (floor division // and modulo % ~ look up what these mean), works out the number of the clock hand to use to display on the screen so that it is pointing roughly North.