Minibloq en la Provincia de San Luis, Argentina

Minibloq está siendo distribuido desde fines del 2011 en escuelas públicas de la Provincia de San Luis, Argentina, en el marco del programa gubernamental Todos a la Robótica. A la fecha, más de 1200 kits Multiplo, producidos por RobotGroup fueron entregados, y están siendo utilizados por chicos de entre 6 y 12 años:

Minibloq en el "Encuentro Linux Curicó 2012", Chile

Hace una semana, pudimos participar del Encuentro Linux 2012, llevado a cabo en la Universidad de Talca en Curicó, Chile. Allí pudimos exponer sobre Minibloq + Multiplo, y hablar de hardware open source. Aquí hay un link al programa del evento.

Queremos agradecer desde aquí la invitación (¡gracias Rogelio!) y la hospitalidad recibidas.

We are at Kickstarter!

Minibloq is open source software. Arduino(R) and its accesories are open source electronics. Now it's time to have truly open source mechanics. What does this mean? When making mechanical parts, the blueprints are not always enough.  Meet Multiplo: an open building system designed so each part can be reproduced by simple tools, like laser cutters, 3D printers or CNC mills. We call this Fab Lab Compatible and allow users to start making their own parts and share them. No needs for moulds, extrussion, or any other expensive manufacturing techniques. In Multiplo, hacking is welcome! Multiplo parts will be published as open source (DXF files). Please take a look to Multiplo's Kickstarter campaign:

Minibloq translated to Croatian!

Minibloq has been translated to Croatian! We want to say thanks to  Robert Sedak for his great work. He has translated even the tooltips. Here is a screenshot:

You can download the zip file containing the Croatian translation from this link. Please follow the following steps to install it:

1. Uncompress the zip file into a temporal path. For example, if you uncompress this file in C:\Temp, you should end with a folder called C:\Temp\Minibloq.

2. Find Minibloq's path (for example: C:\Program Files (x86)\Minibloq.v0.81.UP2). Inside that directory, you will find the folder Components. Copy the whole Minibloq uncompressed folder (in our example C:\Temp\Minibloq) directly into the Components folder. You will see a message box like this:

3. Click Yes. 

4. It's possible then that the OS will show another message box like this:

5. Click Continue.

6. Ready! Now you can run Minibloq.

Enjoy!

Water saving robots in Australia, programmed with Minibloq

Andrew Lawrance told us about a very interesting development he and the students at the Bartle Frere State School are doing. Located in Queensland, Australia, the school won a Reef Guardian "Water Warriors Award" (http://www.environment.gov.au/minister/burke/2011/mr20111111.html) in 2011, for their efforts to reduce water consumption. There, they built an Arduino controlled "water saving robot", and programmed it using Minibloq. Andrew and his students are also working with mobile robots and Minibloq:

Here is a nice article on a local online magazine from Queensland: http://staq.squarespace.com/storage/STAQ38-2%20Digital%20Edition.pdf (the article is in page 4).
Andrew has been contributing to the Minibloq project in other ways. He has made a nice tutorial on how to add custom blocks to Minibloq, and posted it to the forum: http://minibloq.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11. He also developed the first third-party custom block for Minibloq, using the XML interface (plus a bit of  Arduino C/C++ code).

As always, we really like to post interesting things made with Minibloq. If you have a project and want to share it with us, just post about it in the forum, or mention us in Twitter (@juliandasilvag). Thanks!

Native Minibloq for Linux released!

Minibloq for Linux was mainly the work of Juan Pizarro, from doingIT, an open source company from Chile. Many thanks Juan! You can download it by clicking on the above image, or go to the Downloads page.
Also, it may be convenient reading the changelog here. We also updated the documentation to explain how to (easily) run Minibloq under Linux.

Multiple-OS version!
This is not just a native Linux version. Now, by downloading one single distribution, you can run natively under different flavors of Linux AND under Windows (you just need to run MinibloqRun.sh in Linux, or MinibloqRun.exe in Windows). Also, this all-in-one package was designed to include all the necessary dependencies (but it's a Beta, so please tell us if you find problems, thanks!). We want to add support for Mac OS X in the future too (help with this task will very welcome...)

Minibloq UpdatePack-2 also released!
And, if you are a Windows user, this version also includes the UpdatePack-2, with the new language packages sent by users (Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Romanian, plus a partial translation to Italian). If you don't want all the extra Linux stuff, you can download the Windows installer version. So now Minibloq runs in more OSs, and with more language options! Of course, we are always looking for more contributors and translators...

Upcoming v0.82.Beta version
Now we are focused on the next version: the v0.82.Beta. It will take some time, but it will support the adding of third party hardware, among other important features. Plus, we will release the code in a public repository. Right now, everybody can ask for the sources by posting on this  forum thread (we did not released the source code yet because it's still highly hardcoded and because we will also release soon an all-in-one  version of Code::Blocks including all the necessary dependencies to complie Minibloq with a few clicks). More on this soon...

Minibloq translated to Portuguese!

Minibloq has been translated to Portuguese! We want to say thanks to Marco André Ferreira Dias and Anderson Amador Silva from Brazil for their great contribution to the project. The complete translation (including tooltips) will be deployed along with the upcoming UpdatePack-2. We want to take this opportunity to ask for help with more translations. There are currently works in progress to translate Minibloq to  Italian and to Hebrew (but the tooltips for both languages are not finished and yes, we need some volunteers to translate them). Of course, any other translation will be very welcome. All the names of the people who is helping with the project are mentioned in the Credits webpage. By now, here is a screenshot showing the work of Marco Andrés and Anderson Amador: