More blocks! Report #2

As promised, here is another post about recently developed blocks for the upcoming Beta. Let's start with the Servo block:

There is also a work in progress to improve some existent blocks. For example, now the Serial block can manage several serial ports. This is very important for some boards, like the Mega, the DuinoBot, or the Maple:

Another improvement are the small icons on blocks with multiple params, like the buzzer, or some math blocks. This will help to identify quickly the parameters. For example, here you can see the icons for the two params belonging to the buzzer block: Note (or frequency) and Duration:

ATTiny + Arduino ISP example: Meet the TomiBot

Now the Tinys can be also programmed with the ArduinoISP (thanks to Adam Emberton for the idea!). Although this will be a preliminary feature in the upcoming Beta, I'm testing it as much as possible. And as an example app, I mounted by hand a small Tiny25 into a universal PCB on a RobotGroup's TomiBot (this low-cost-open-source small robot has not been released yet). Here are some pictures of the creature:

And why not use Minibloq with other very small boards, such as the Sparkfun's AVR Stick or 8 Pin AVR Development Board?

ATTiny25/45/85 + AVR-Doper or USBasp = very little board added

Based on a port of the Arduino core libraries created by Alessandro Saporetti and slightly modified by HLT, new hardware has been added to the upcoming Beta: the ATTiny25, ATTiny45 and ATTiny85 microcontrollers, running @ 1MHz with their internal osc. These incredibly useful, yet small MCUs, can be programmed easily with some external programmer, such as the open source AVR-Doper or the USBasp.

More blocks! Report #1

I have been working on some important new blocks before the Beta release. Here are some of them (another post with more blocks soon!). I know, someone can think that this is complex, but there are good news: a teacher or any other user who wants to simplify the GUI, can configure Minibloq to load only some blocks (I will write more on this with the Beta documentation):

Another new feature is a better organization subsystem for the blocks. The last row, for example, now contains the special sensors blocks. Although in Minibloq it's possible to read a sensor with the AnalogRead standard block, now there are some special sensor blocks, like Seeedstudio's ultrasonic ranger. I'm working with different manufacturers to add more sensors soon.

Mega boards added!

Three new important boards has been added:

Arduino™ Mega 2560
Arduino™ Mega (ATmega1280)
Seeeduino Mega

They will be included in the (coming soon) Minibloq.v0.8.Beta:

Open source robotics activity pads!

We have designed 3 activity pads at RGLabs, and RobotGroup has released them. I want to share the links here because they may be useful to Minibloqers. Those pads belongs to the Multiplo project, which is an open source robotics platform under constant development.

The pads has been designed using Inkscape, an Open source SVG graphics editor and there are 3 of them: The one shown here allows to do general activities, like line-following, etc.. There is also a sumo pad and a millimetric grid. The 3 were designed to be printed with a standard plotter. You can download the PNG version (just to go and print) or the SVGs (which in this case are "the sources"). Here are the links:

Multiplo.PAD.Basic9x7 (hi-res png)
Multiplo.PAD.Basic9x7 (svg)
Multiplo.PAD.Sumo9x9 (hi-res png)
Multiplo.PAD.Sumo9x9 (svg)
Multiplo.PAD.Grid9x7 (hi-res png)
Multiplo.PAD.Grid9x7 (svg)

Enjoy!

Maple 32 bits board is here!

We are having a lot of activity in the project these days. Since the v0.8.Alpha was sent to backers and alpha testers we got a lot of feedback, and we are now working hard to release the Beta. One of the Beta's biggest improvements will be the ability to work with a lot of boards. Most of them will be Arduino-compatible boards, with 8-bit AVR microcontrollers. But this week we added a very different board to the list of supported hardware: The Maple (32-bits!) from LeafLabs. It features an ARM Cortex M3 processor running at 72 MHz. Although the multiboard subsystem is still a work in progress, this shows clearly Minibloq's capacity to deal with different hardware and backend compilers.