Minibloq

SparkFun Electronic's ProtoSnap MiniBot tutorial

2013-05-22T11:56:00.000-03:00

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

2013-05-20T17:18:00.000-03:00

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

2013-05-19T14:51:00.002-03:00

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!

2013-05-17T17:09:00.001-03:00

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!

2013-05-12T14:06:00.000-03:00

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!

2013-04-11T22:16:00.000-03:00

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

2013-02-25T11:08:00.001-03:00

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

Minibloq translated to Malay Language!

2012-12-03T17:57:00.000-03:00

Minibloq has been translated to Malay Language! We want to say thanks to Hazizul Krilp for his great contribution to the project. 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. As always, all the names of the people who is helping with the project are mentioned in the Credits webpage. Here we want to share a screenshot showing the work of Hazizul:

Minibloq + Romeo + R/C Car

2012-11-27T12:33:00.000-03:00

We want to share here the work of Jean-Daniel Planterose (who also helped with the French translation of Minibloq). The project uses the IR remote control capabilities of Minibloq and the PWM blocks to control the motors. Here is the link to the project page, and here is a picture of the hacked car:

Jean-Daniel also added a link to the code and a small video showing how it works:

Thanks JD for this nice example!

Sources released and more news!

2012-11-12T18:39:00.000-03:00

Yesterday, we finally released Minibloq's full source code in our Develpoment page (please go to the last section to get it, along with full compilation instructions). We would have preferred do it before, but the code is not so nice in our opinion. We will take this opportunity to talk about our plans and the project status.

Experience with Minibloq

Although Minibloq is in use by a lot of people, it's still something more like an experiment. We are happy to know that a lot of users are children. Minibloq has some unique features specially designed to help children and beginners to reduce the learning curve. Among these are:

Contextual block pickers, which only shows to the user the blocks that can fit as parameters for other blocks.
Real time error checking.
Automatic variable name management (which also works in real time).
And for the advanced users, another useful feature is the real time code generator.

By other way, we are really happy with the community and the contributions from users, such as the translations to 14 languages (some of them still partial translations) and the contributed documentation and examples.

The experiment

So, why do we say that it's an experiment? Well, the mentioned features has proved to work nicely, but Minibloq still lacks a lot of really important things, such as:

User blocks, equivalent to functions and procedures.
More datatypes.
Multihardware subsystem, where the users can easily add their own hardware to the backend.
Plug-in system to expand the software itself.
User interface features, such as UnDo/ReDo, or multi block selection.

And there are more desirable things to add to the software which means that it still needs heavy development. We thought that we could add some of these features for the next version (v0.82), but after taking some time to design and to explore possibilites, and to analyze the project deeeper, we arrived to the conclusion that we need to make some things from zero. As that's a lot of work, we decided to see other ways of doing things, in easier ways, to reach the goals sooner and better. So we will make major changes in the whole thing. We are studying to move from wxWidgets. It's a really great library, but we think it's time to migrate to other technologies (more on this soon...)

The released sources and the IDE

Now the sources are published. We always sent them to anyone who has requested the sources, but now you can download them with just one click. If you take a look to the last section of our Development page (please go to the last section there) you will alfo find the instructions to compile both under Windows(R) and under GNU/Linux. Finally, we want to say that we worked a lot to publish an all-in-one portable Code::Blocks IDE for Windows(R), with precompiled wxWidgets included (among other things, like the Irrlich open source game engine):

Multiplo

As many of you know, we finished a successful Kickstarter campaign for our new open source robot building system called Multiplo. We are also working on the integration with new hardware related to Multiplo and want to make some improvements specifically designed to improve the user experience when working with robots. But of course, all this new stuff will take time. We are now working on the rewards belonging to this campaign.

The forum and the website

As we said in a post long time ago, we were working on a new website. This is not ready yet and also will take time. Among other things, there will be an improved forum. We will also work to keep spam controlled, which is nearly impossible in the current forum. Some time ago we started to receive an increasing number of spam posts, between 50 and 100 per day. The rate between legitimate posts and spam messages was probably nearly 1 to 300. And since Minibloq is now better documented, and since we did not received much questions via the forum, we decided to close the threads in the current forum. We are sorry for that, but we were not able any more to spend that big quantity of time moderating the forum. We hope to find a better solution in the future.

That said, we want to let you know that we are still here, working hard on the project but making big changes, which we hope will make it much better. But it will take some time.

Thanks!
Julián

Pequeña guía básica en español

2012-11-11T18:19:00.002-03:00

RobotGroup armó una pequeña guía básica en español, tipo tutorial, donde se muestra paso a paso cómo programar las salidas de motor (en aquellas placas que las tienen, tales como los controladoers DuinoBot, o placas Arduino(R) equipadas con un shield de motores). La guía está en PDF y se puede abrir/bajar haciendo un click en la siguiete imagen:

New French documentation (Thanks Jean Pierre!)

2012-11-09T14:08:00.002-03:00

We want to say thanks to Jean Pierre Raumer for his new translations to French of Minibloq and Multiplo documenation. Here are some links:

Please note that some of the pictures in these docs may not be visible without internet conection, since the docs may be including them as links.

Jean Pierre also translated Multiplo tutorials (written by Rodolfo Cossovich, and with help of Fabián Novell), and we added them in Multiplo's Doc Center (most of these tutorials include examples made with Minibloq):

http://multiplo.org/tut2
http://multiplo.org/tut3
http://multiplo.org/tut4
http://multiplo.org/tutorial-5-follow-the-light
http://multiplo.org/tut1 (this one is just about Multiplo, and does not cointain Minibloq code)

I also want to take this opportunity to say thanks to the guys at Sparkfun for their post about Multiplo (where Minibloq was also mentioned), a few weeks ago.

Minibloq+Multiplo @ Shanghai Maker Carnival

2012-11-07T18:09:00.001-03:00

Multiplo was invited to participate in the Shanghai Maker Carnival 2012. Rodolfo Cossovich was there showing the upcoming Multiplo kits, which can be programmed both with Minibloq and the Arduino IDE:

Minibloq en la Provincia de San Luis, Argentina

2012-11-04T20:18:00.000-03:00

Minibloq está siendo distribuido desde fines del 2011 en escuelas públicas de la Provincia de San Luis, Argentina, en el marco del programa gubernamental Todos a la Robótica. A la fecha, más de 1200 kits Multiplo, producidos por RobotGroup fueron entregados, y están siendo utilizados por chicos de entre 6 y 12 años:

Minibloq en el "Encuentro Linux Curicó 2012", Chile

2012-11-02T13:05:00.003-03:00

Hace una semana, pudimos participar del Encuentro Linux 2012, llevado a cabo en la Universidad de Talca en Curicó, Chile. Allí pudimos exponer sobre Minibloq + Multiplo, y hablar de hardware open source. Aquí hay un link al programa del evento.

Queremos agradecer desde aquí la invitación (¡gracias Rogelio!) y la hospitalidad recibidas.

We are at Kickstarter!

2012-09-09T17:42:00.000-03:00

Minibloq is open source software. Arduino(R) and its accesories are open source electronics. Now it's time to have truly open source mechanics. What does this mean? When making mechanical parts, the blueprints are not always enough. Meet Multiplo: an open building system designed so each part can be reproduced by simple tools, like laser cutters, 3D printers or CNC mills. We call this Fab Lab Compatible and allow users to start making their own parts and share them. No needs for moulds, extrussion, or any other expensive manufacturing techniques. In Multiplo, hacking is welcome! Multiplo parts will be published as open source (DXF files). Please take a look to Multiplo's Kickstarter campaign:

Minibloq translated to Croatian!

2012-09-07T01:14:00.000-03:00

Minibloq has been translated to Croatian! We want to say thanks to Robert Sedak for his great work. He has translated even the tooltips. Here is a screenshot:

You can download the zip file containing the Croatian translation from this link. Please follow the following steps to install it:

1. Uncompress the zip file into a temporal path. For example, if you uncompress this file in C:\Temp, you should end with a folder called C:\Temp\Minibloq.

2. Find Minibloq's path (for example: C:\Program Files (x86)\Minibloq.v0.81.UP2). Inside that directory, you will find the folder Components. Copy the whole Minibloq uncompressed folder (in our example C:\Temp\Minibloq) directly into the Components folder. You will see a message box like this:

3. Click Yes.

4. It's possible then that the OS will show another message box like this:

5. Click Continue.

6. Ready! Now you can run Minibloq.

Enjoy!

Water saving robots in Australia, programmed with Minibloq

2012-08-30T00:20:00.003-03:00

Andrew Lawrance told us about a very interesting development he and the students at the Bartle Frere State School are doing. Located in Queensland, Australia, the school won a Reef Guardian "Water Warriors Award" (http://www.environment.gov.au/minister/burke/2011/mr20111111.html) in 2011, for their efforts to reduce water consumption. There, they built an Arduino controlled "water saving robot", and programmed it using Minibloq. Andrew and his students are also working with mobile robots and Minibloq:

Here is a nice article on a local online magazine from Queensland: http://staq.squarespace.com/storage/STAQ38-2%20Digital%20Edition.pdf (the article is in page 4).
Andrew has been contributing to the Minibloq project in other ways. He has made a nice tutorial on how to add custom blocks to Minibloq, and posted it to the forum: http://minibloq.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11. He also developed the first third-party custom block for Minibloq, using the XML interface (plus a bit of Arduino C/C++ code).

As always, we really like to post interesting things made with Minibloq. If you have a project and want to share it with us, just post about it in the forum, or mention us in Twitter (@juliandasilvag). Thanks!

Native Minibloq for Linux released!

2012-08-14T16:11:00.002-03:00

Minibloq for Linux was mainly the work of Juan Pizarro, from doingIT, an open source company from Chile. Many thanks Juan! You can download it by clicking on the above image, or go to the Downloads page.
Also, it may be convenient reading the changelog here. We also updated the documentation to explain how to (easily) run Minibloq under Linux.

Multiple-OS version!
This is not just a native Linux version. Now, by downloading one single distribution, you can run natively under different flavors of Linux AND under Windows (you just need to run MinibloqRun.sh in Linux, or MinibloqRun.exe in Windows). Also, this all-in-one package was designed to include all the necessary dependencies (but it's a Beta, so please tell us if you find problems, thanks!). We want to add support for Mac OS X in the future too (help with this task will very welcome...)

Minibloq UpdatePack-2 also released!
And, if you are a Windows user, this version also includes the UpdatePack-2, with the new language packages sent by users (Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Romanian, plus a partial translation to Italian). If you don't want all the extra Linux stuff, you can download the Windows installer version. So now Minibloq runs in more OSs, and with more language options! Of course, we are always looking for more contributors and translators...

Upcoming v0.82.Beta version
Now we are focused on the next version: the v0.82.Beta. It will take some time, but it will support the adding of third party hardware, among other important features. Plus, we will release the code in a public repository. Right now, everybody can ask for the sources by posting on this forum thread (we did not released the source code yet because it's still highly hardcoded and because we will also release soon an all-in-one version of Code::Blocks including all the necessary dependencies to complie Minibloq with a few clicks). More on this soon...

Minibloq translated to Portuguese!

2012-08-06T12:04:00.000-03:00

Minibloq has been translated to Portuguese! We want to say thanks to Marco André Ferreira Dias and Anderson Amador Silva from Brazil for their great contribution to the project. The complete translation (including tooltips) will be deployed along with the upcoming UpdatePack-2. We want to take this opportunity to ask for help with more translations. There are currently works in progress to translate Minibloq to Italian and to Hebrew (but the tooltips for both languages are not finished and yes, we need some volunteers to translate them). Of course, any other translation will be very welcome. All the names of the people who is helping with the project are mentioned in the Credits webpage. By now, here is a screenshot showing the work of Marco Andrés and Anderson Amador:

Minibloq translated to Simplified Chinese!

2012-07-23T10:19:00.001-03:00

We want to say thanks to Rodolfo Cossovich and Zhao Qian, from RobotGroup Shanghai (now Multiplo LLC), for the complete translation (including blocks tooltips) to Simplified Chinese:

We are always looking for help with translations, to make Minibloq accesible to more people.

Cloud IDEs for Arduino

2012-07-22T12:06:00.000-03:00

In the last few weeks, two interesting projects has been published, both aimed to program Arduino compatible hardware from Internet, without installation. We think both cloud and native solutions have their pros and cons, but more options are good for the users, so we wanted to mention these environments here. The firstone is codebender. They have given us the possibility of testing it, and it works nicely:

The other one is Wifino, a project that also include a new board, but sadly we could not test it yet.

Minibloq translation to Romanian finished (thanks Petru)!

2012-07-12T08:52:00.000-03:00

The Romanian translation has been finished! We want to say thanks to Petru Isan for this great contribution to the project. A partial translation to Romanian was included with the UpdatePack-1. But now, this translation has been finished (including the blocks tooltips), and it will be included along with the next UpdatePack. Here is a screenshot:

Minibloq+Multiplo en la Provincia de Entre Ríos, Argentina

2012-07-08T13:12:00.000-03:00

Hace dos semanas, en ocasión de la Semana de la Ciencia, fuimos invitados por la Dirección de Educación Superior de la Provincia de Entre Ríos, Argentina para hablar de enseñanza tecnológica con Multiplo y Minibloq en las ciudades de Paraná y de Crespo. Allí estuvimos junto a Mónica Paves, Directora de RobotGroup:

Minibloq v0.81.Beta UpdatePack-1 is here!

2012-07-01T18:41:00.002-03:00

As promised, the UpdatePack-1 (UP1 for short) is available now. And it's the result of the constributions of many users (thanks again!). Aside from minor bug fixes (all of them related to the new internationalization subsystem), it includes the following 5 complete language packages (by complete we mean that both the GUI and the blocks tooltips has been translated): French, German, Dutch, Catalan and Galician. We also decided to add 2 partial translations: Romanian and Hebrew. Of course, we still need help to get Minibloq translated to other languages, or to complete the partial translations. Revisions on the current translations are also welcome (we may have bugs, since all this is new...)

Here is a small screen capture from the Properties window (View->Properties menu) once the UP1 is installed:

To get and install the UP1, please these steps (here we are using Windows 7, but it should be even simpler in other Windows versions):

Donwload the UpdatePack-1 from here.
Now you have to decompress it inside your current Minibloq.v0.81.Beta installation path as shown in the images below:

Now the operating system will ask if you want to replace the files with the same name: please just say Yes:

And again, the OS will ask something (this time, if you want to merge some folders with the same name). And again: please say Yes:

And yes: once again, the OS will ask if you are sure to replace some files. And once again, please press Copy and Replace:

And finally, the OS will ask to you for administrator permission. Please press the Continue button:

Finally, please remember that if you have any question or idea about internationalization, you can always post to this forum thread.