The next version of Minibloq is approaching. Here are some of the small improvements (there are bigger ones, more about this soon…) Minibloq will support comments:And, as can be seen in the picture, the comments are inserted (in real time) into the generated code too:

And here are some new blocks, ideal for robotics:

And for the curious, here is an interesting small document (PDF, Spanish) from David Vilaseca about the development of the class for the Sharp IR rangers: http://minibloq.net/Files/Doc/IRRanger.Dev.ESP.20101207.pdfAlthough the class for the rangers is not yet fine tunned, it already works, and we will try improve these blocks it in future versions.

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.

Thanks!

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):

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.

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

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.

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

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:

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

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!

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:

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

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!