Thanks for the posts and the mirrors! And some news...

Hi! Has been two weeks since Minibloq.v0.8.Beta was released. So I want to say thanks! First, thanks for the feedback, the tweets, the comments, and the posts in other blogs. I'm sure I'm missing some of them (please add your link in the comments belonging to this post), but there are some interesting ones about the project I want to mention here:

Arduino's official blog (thanks Priya!)
Hack A Day (for the second time! Thanks Mike!)
Maker Masters (thanks again Bill!)
I Programmer (thanks Harry!)
Mexchip (en español, ¡Gracias!)
chetanpatil.info and Planet FLOSS India (thanks Chetan!)

Spreading the word is now very important to help the project. I'm already working on the next version (v0.81.Beta), and some friends are helping with the code and with the porting to other OSs (such as Mac OS X). But the most important thing now is to strengthen the user community. I hope to have also an online forum this week (or the next one). I want to say thanks to the mirrors too, in Mexico (thanks again to Mexchip) and in Netherlands (thanks to Gijs Noorlander) and in Finland (thanks to Jari). Please visit the Download section to get Minibloq from RobotGroup's server or from the mirrors.

And there is also a good new for Mac OS X users!
Ulises Mendoza, from Spain, has finished a first approach to run Minibloq.v0.8.Beta under Mac OS X, using Wine. I know it's still difficult to install, and I will really like to have the native version ready as soon as possible, but it's just the first step. Minibloq was developed with cross-platform and open source tools (wxWidgets and GCC), so I hope to have native versions both for Linux and for Mac OS X in a not-so-far-future. Here is the screenshoot of the previous (Alpha) Wineskin version running:

Regarding the native Linux version, a company from Chile (http://doingit.cl, special thanks to Juan Pizarro) is helping to compile Minibloq for Debian-based Linux distributions. More on this soon...

Enjoy!

MINIBLOQ BETA RELEASED!

To download Minibloq, please click on the image above, or go to the Download page...

Minibloq.v0.8.Beta: New features

Minibloq.v0.8.Beta is nearly ready and will be soon available for download. Here is a small video showing some of the new features:

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.