miniBloq.v0.82 released!

Here are some of the new features and improvements:

miniSim!

This is a new, simple 2D robot simulator designed to help teaching simple robotics principles for those who don't own a robot:

Complete new XML backend

These are good news for all the developers, manufacturers and advanced users who want to add new hardware and custom blocks. Now you can do it just editing XML files! I will work on the Developer's Guide in the next days to explain how.

A lot of new hardware

Thanks to the new backend, there is a lot of new supported hardware (specially robots!), including: Pi-Bot, Sparki robot, SparkFun RedBot and RedBoard, Arduino Leonardo and the new Multiplo's DuinoBot.v2.3, both in HID and in CDC modes...

Write both graphical or text based programs

Or even combine graphical with text-based programming anytime during the development of your program. The new miniBloq can even work as a (simple) standard IDE!

And many other features...

• miniBloq is now faster and it remembers its settings (like the selected hardware, the screen dimensions and the serial port). Also, you can associate mbqc files to it in order to open them with double click.
• Of course, there are more blocks and bug fixes.
• A LOT of examples! And they has been rearranged. Check them with the File-Examples menu, and remember that most of the examples are under the DuinoBot folder. And don't worry if you don't have a DuinoBot board: most of those examples run on an regular Arduino.

Portable Python + OpenCV!

Advanced users will find this really interesting: miniBloq now includes Portable Pytnhon and OpenCV to do some more advanced activities with interactive programming (not graphical yet) and computer vision. Here is a tutorial from SparkFun, wrote at during my Hackers In Residence early this year (thanks Linz!).

Downoad it it now!

This is the direct link to get the v0.82. Enjoy!

To read more about all the changes (and known issues), take a look to the changelog.  Finally, as many of you already know, miniBloq has moved to GitHub. So the complete source code is available from the online repository: https://github.com/miniBloq/v0.82. You can both replicate the repo, or just use the Donwload ZIP button there to get the complete source code.

In future posts I will be talking about some of the new features in this version...