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.