New ready-to-use Examples with Videos, Code and Fritzing Circuits

Hi! As part of the new preliminary documentation, we have added a page with complete examples, most of which include Frizting diagrams, videos and Minibloq code (mbqc files). These examples start from the simple ones (like the well known "blink", to get started fast) adding complexity progressively. All of them include the parts list and most can be built using spare components as well as sets such as the RobotGroup Multiplo TechBox, the SparkFun Inventor's Kit for Arduino, or the ::oomlout:: ARDX. We encourage Minibloq users to add their own designs to the forum, so we can post about them too! You can click here, or in the following image to go to the page:

And talking about tutorials and examples, I want to mention here two Minibloq users who wrote about how to use Minibloq:

First I want to say thanks to Andrew, from Australia, who is using Minibloq in classroom. He made the first "third party blocks", and also wrote an introductory tutorial on the forum about this. Thanks Andrew!

And finally, thanks to Guntur, from Indonesia, for these three posts in his blog:

http://gunture.blogspot.com/2011/11/tutorial-program-minibloq-arduino.html
http://gunture.blogspot.com/2011/11/cara-menginstal-minibloq-arduino.html
http://gunture.blogspot.com/2011/11/mengenal-minibloq-arduino.html

Minibloq's preliminary documentation ready!

Well, finally the preliminary documentation is here. It's still a work in progress, but it covers at least the basics. There is a lot of things to do, like indexing or explaining how to add custom blocks, for example. Although this blog is a temporal website (we are working on a new one), we want to have the project as good documented as possible.  You can see the main documentation page here:

http://blog.minibloq.org/p/documentation.html

And here is a new page with brief explanations about the current blocks:

Blocks

I also recommend to take a look to this small page also:

Versions, changelog and known issues

And please don't forget that these pages can be translated, be mirrored, etc.. Any help making Minibloq's documentation more accesible will be very welcome.

Finally as most of you may know, we have a forum! Build a large community of users is probably the most important project's goal right now. And an active forum will surely have a central role for the community.  Please become part of it. You can register here, and start participating on the project. We are also working on improve it, and trying to keep spammers away.  I want to thanks to Robert Sellers, from Tesla Robotics who is actively helping witht the forum.

Thanks!

New Minibloq forum

Hi! I've been working to put on-line a forum for the project. It's a standard forum phpBB3, and although it's not yet fully integrated with this blog, it's working since today:

http://minibloq.net/forum

By now, bugs can be reported there (starting a topic here). Anyway, in the future, the bug reporting system will be improved a lot (with a ticket system).

I did not create categories for different languages, to avoid complexity, but I encourage users to post in any language in the current categories. Suggestions about the forum itself can be made in the category Forum, Spam & Website. I hope the forum will become a nice way to improve the communication between Minibloq users. Any help spreading the word will be welcome, as always.

Finally, I want to thanks John from http://smithery.co, who made a post about Minibloq's development history: http://smithery.co/making/arduino-diary-week-4/. And also thanks to ROMILLY, for his post here.

Julián

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!