Los robots cambian historias: Valeria Larrart at TEDxRioLimay

Multiplo's Repository and the new Parts Library

As many of you already know, Minibloq and Multiplo are brother projects. We have been working a lot on Multiplo in the last months, and there is a new website, where we have released a lot of open source mechanical parts 2 weeks ago. These parts has been designed with one important goal: to be fablab compatible. This means that every Multiplo mechanical part can be manufactured using common tools found in the growing community of fablabs and hackerspaces, such as laser cutters, 3D printers and small CNC machines. So we designed them carefully, making them tolerant to differences in the materials, such as variations in the thickness, weight, etc.. There are more parts designed, and we will try to publish them soon.

The Parts Library

Although we still have to improve it a lot, we released what we have called the Parts Library. If you dig into it, you will find nearly 300 parts, with their 3D and 2D drawings, and even with an interactive 3D viewer (thanks to GitHub!).  Here are some screen shots, but you can actually go and see it by yourself:

And here is the embedded GitHub's 3D viewer for each part:

We still need to improve the whole website a lot, and we have plans to enhance the Parts Library as well as the Store and the online documentation soon, but if you want to download all the parts together, in a single zip file, you can always visit our GitHub repository: https://github.com/multiplo (the drawings for the parts are in the mechanics repo).

Finally, I want to share here a video of one of the new N8 robots in action, assembled as a netbook carrier:

Minibloq + LegoDuino

Some time ago, Jeroen Benschop published his LegoDuino project, which was also featured at Hack A Day. Jeroen decided to use Minibloq as the programming environment for his platform, and also contributed with an experimental version with an improved backend (we talked about that version in this post).  You can download the modified version of Minibloq for LegoDuino from here, as well as get complete information about the project from Jeroen's blog.

Minibloq + Multiplo @ Tecnópolis 2013, Argentina

For the third consecutive year, Multiplo robots are present in RobotGroup's space in Tecnópolis, Argentina. Tecnópolis is Argentina's biggest expo of science and technology (50 hectares), and will be open for about 4 months:

You can find more information about RobotGroup's robotics exhibition here: http://tecnopolis.ar/2013/atracciones/ciencia-para-todos-robotica

Minibloq + Multiplo @San Luis, Argentina

Mónica Paves, Director of RobotGroup taught a course for teachers in the province of San Luis, Argentina, where nearly 2000 Multiplo tech kits were distributed in public schools.
Here are some pictures of the event:

SparkFun Electronic's ProtoSnap MiniBot tutorial

We are glad that there is a new tutorial with Minibloq, made by Sparkfun Electronics, the: SparkFun Electronic's ProtoSnap MiniBot tutorial (English, ZIP file). The previous link contains both PDF and ODT (LibreOffice) files with a tutorial made by Sparkfun Electronics, to use Minibloq with their ProtoSnap MiniBot.

Minibloq in Croatia

We want to congratulate Robert Sedak for his hard work in Croatia, where he encourages kids to work with robotics and open source hardware and software. This month, he was participating in the largest Open Source Conference in Southeast Europe: DORS/CLUC (http://2013.dorscluc.org/en/). He talked there about Arduino, Minibloq, and even Multiplo (our open source, fablab-compatible robotics building system). Here are some pictures from his presentation:

By other way, Robert and two kids from his robotics club were guests on Croatian National Television because kids won first prise in Robotic Contest. Here is the interview in YouTube:

So we want again to say: thanks Robert and thanks kids for your work!

Experimental changes from a project contributor, for Minibloq developers

As you may already know, we really like to share the work of other people who wants to contribute to the project. A few weeks ago, Jeroen Benschop has uploaded an experimental version of Miniboq, based on makefiles, aimed to ease the adding of third party hardware and blocks. Although we will have a far better backend in the v0.9x Minibloq series, we think that this may be of interest for some advanced users and developers. So here is the link to his sources and library changes:

http://www.benschop-plaza.nl/MinibloqChanges.zip

Thanks Jeroen!

Minibloq translated to Greek!

Another translation has been sent by an enthusiast Minibloq user. This time the contributor is Alexis Vlassis, and here we want to say thanks. This time, translation is partial (the complete GUI plus the tooltips belonging to Action blocks). It's available from the Downloads page as a separate package (this is the direct link). The steps to add this kind of package to Minibloq are pretty simple, and can be found in this post. Here is a screenshot of his work (so thanks again Alexis!):

Collaboration with the Sparki project!

Hi! We were talking with Joe, to add support to his Sparki open source robot in Minibloq. Sparki is an interesting eduational robot, with a lot of sensors and other really nice features (such as steppers-based traction and a small gripper). You can found it at Kickstarter in this link.

Minibloq translated to Bahasa Indonesia!

I want to say thanks to Wawan Hartanto for his work translating Minibloq to Indonesian Language. The complete translation (including tooltips) is available from the Downloads page as a separate package (this is the direct link). The steps to add this kind of package to Minibloq are pretty simple, and can be found in this post. Here is a screenshot of his work:

Nuevo tutorial de robótica con Arduino y Minibloq

Los amigos de http://robotarduedu.blogspot.com.es han publicado un tutorial más que interesante sobre cómo construir y programar un sencillo robot utilizando Arduino + Minibloq. Por lo que se vé en su blog, parece que pronto tendrán material adicional para otros modelos de robots. El siguiente link muestra el tutorial completo, que incluye listas de partes, instrucciones 3D de montaje y finalmente cómo programar todo con Minibloq:

http://robotarduedu.blogspot.com.es/p/robot-arduino-minibloq_21.html