New English documentation (online) and Spanish User Manual

We have been working hard on the project's documentation since the v0.8.Beta launch. We added a Forum, an Examples page, and worked a lot on the Documentation page. This week we added new sections to that page, with links to third party documents, explanations about real time error checking, automatic variable names managing, and more. And finally, we have now a new User Manual, which by the moment comes in Spanish (although most of its content can be found in the Documentation page). But the good news about this User Manual is that we published both PDF and the ODT files (LibreOffice), so you can modify it! We encourage users to translate it to other languages, or even to include it in other documents. Here are the links (you can click on the side images). As always, if you found errors or have comments about these new documents, you can report them in the forum's Bugs category.

Of course, we were also working hard on the next Minibloq version, and will post about it soon.

Thanks!

Nuevo tutorial con ejemplos en Español / New tutorial with examples in Spanish

Un nuevo y completo tutorial en español ha sido publicado por José Manuel Ruiz Gutiérrez, a quien felicitamos por su trabajo. Nos pone felices ver que la comunidad de usuarios está aportando material y apoyando el proyecto. Aquí hay un link directo al documento (en PDF):

Guía en español de robótica / Spanish robotics guide

RobotGroup ha publicado hoy una guía de robótica básica con actividades en Arduino y en Minibloq. Todas las actividades están hechas con el robot Multiplo N6, pero son válidas en general para cualquier robot con tracción diferencial y un controlador compatible con Arduino (en este caso el N6 utiliza el DuinoBot de RobotGroup).  La guía puede descargarse del siguiente link:

http://www.robotgroup.com.ar/doc/Multiplo/N6/Guide.Robotics-1.ESP.20120105.pdf

Las primeras páginas están destinadas sobre todo a la instalación de los drivers, el software, etc., pero luego pueden encontrarse 23 actividades, que incluyen código y concisas explicaciones teóricas.

Tutorials and posts in different languages, thanks!

We are happy to see posts and tutorials about Minibloq in different languages. And as we did before, we want to say thanks and mention some of them here.

• Antonio, from Spain has been writing tutorials in Gallego (Galician). You can take a look to his very interesting educational website here.

• Gijs from the Netherlands has wrote both a post in his blog, and an entry about Minibloq in the Dutch version of Wikipedia. Gijs is also hosting the Dutch mirror to download Minibloq.

• Here is another post from the Netherlands, but in English (thanks Walter!):  http://waprile.weblog.tudelft.nl/2011/12/07/minibloq-a-visual-programming-editor-for

• And finally, a post from Germany, in German:   http://www.robodino.de/Schlagwort/minibloq

Thanks!
Julián

Minibloq & Sparkfun Inventor's Kit for Arduino

There is new material ready-for-use, created by Sparkfun (thanks Linz!) using Minibloq and the Sparkfun Inventor's Kit for Arduino. Currently there are 7 new examples, which include nice printable guides, both in pdf and odt (LibreOffice) file formats, under a Creative Commons Attribution -ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Also, each example includes the Minibloq code (mbqc file). You can download a complete package with all the examples from this link (~ 2 MB). Once you have downloaded and decompressed it, you will find the printable guides under the /Doc subdirectory, on each example's subdir.

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!