Wednesday, May 22, 2013

SparkFun Electronic's ProtoSnap MiniBot tutorial

We are glad that there is a new tutorial with Minibloq, made by Sparkfun Electronics, the: SparkFun Electronic's ProtoSnap MiniBot tutorial (English, ZIP file). The previous link contains both PDF and ODT (LibreOffice) files with a tutorial made by Sparkfun Electronics, to use Minibloq with their ProtoSnap MiniBot.


Monday, May 20, 2013

Minibloq in Croatia

We want to congratulate Robert Sedak for his hard work in Croatia, where he encourages kids to work with robotics and open source hardware and software. This month, he was participating in the largest Open Source Conference in Southeast Europe: DORS/CLUC (http://2013.dorscluc.org/en/). He talked there about Arduino, Minibloq, and even Multiplo (our open source, fablab-compatible robotics building system). Here are some pictures from his presentation:

By other way, Robert and two kids from his robotics club were guests on Croatian National Television because kids won first prise in Robotic Contest. Here is the interview in YouTube:
So we want again to say: thanks Robert and thanks kids for your work!

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Experimental changes from a project contributor, for Minibloq developers

As you may already know, we really like to share the work of other people who wants to contribute to the project. A few weeks ago, Jeroen Benschop has uploaded an experimental version of Miniboq, based on makefiles, aimed to ease the adding of third party hardware and blocks. Although we will have a far better backend in the v0.9x Minibloq series, we think that this may be of interest for some advanced users and developers. So here is the link to his sources and library changes:

http://www.benschop-plaza.nl/MinibloqChanges.zip

Thanks Jeroen!

Friday, May 17, 2013

Minibloq translated to Greek!

Another translation has been sent by an enthusiast Minibloq user. This time the contributor is Alexis Vlassis, and here we want to say thanks. This time, translation is partial (the complete GUI plus the tooltips belonging to Action blocks). It's available from the Downloads page as a separate package (this is the direct link). The steps to add this kind of package to Minibloq are pretty simple, and can be found in this post. Here is a screenshot of his work (so thanks again Alexis!):


Sunday, May 12, 2013

Collaboration with the Sparki project!

Hi! We were talking with Joe, to add support to his Sparki open source robot in Minibloq. Sparki is an interesting eduational robot, with a lot of sensors and other really nice features (such as steppers-based traction and a small gripper). You can found it at Kickstarter in this link.