[ANN] Physical Etoys 2.0 released!

 

Interfacing with Arduino is very cool.  It is high on my list of things to play with (as time permits)

Now in case you ever need anything more industrial/powerful (but more costly) here are a couple of things I have been kept a wishful eye on for a couple of years (but I have not yet had time to play with). I share this on the random chance someone gets interested in it before I get a chance to play - hopefully early next year.

http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-7350
200MHz ARM9 CPU;  32MB SDRAM (64-128MB opt)
8MB RAM Framebuffer;  able to drive TFT-LCDs via custom FPGA
5K LUT FPGA  <----------------
Boots Linux 2.6 in about 1 second <----------------
1 10/100 ethernet port,  2 USB 2.0 (12Mbit/s max),  1 SD Card slot
$129

http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-7550
250MHz ARM9 CPU;  64MB DDR-RAM;  256MB SLC XNAND Drive
Customizable 5K LUT OpenCore FPGA <----------------
1 10/100 Ethernet,  33 DIO, SPI and I2C interfaces,  8 TTL UART, 1 CAN bus
$89

http://www.embeddedarm.com/about/resource.php?item=628

http://www.embeddedarm.com/documentation/articles/reliability.pdf

http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/pc104-peripherals.php

cheers -ben

Congratulation.

Project looks great.

Getting a Lego Robot is on my list of stuff I want if I ever have any excess money :-)

Karl

 

On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 12:00 AM, Ricardo Moran <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi everybody (and sorry if you receive multiple copies),

I would like to announce a new version of Physical Etoys, now with a lot of new features:

1. First of all, it's based on Etoys 5.0 so it incorporates all the bug-fixes and new features from the Etoys release.
2. We are now focusing on the two main hardware platforms: Arduino and Lego Mindstorms Nxt. For the rest, we will publish a set of "external modules" that you can install in your Physical Etoys version.
3. Also, we now support an argentinian version of Arduino, which is called DuinoBot and it's currently being used in a lot of argentinian schools.
4. We added new devices for arduino and now we also support the use of digital devices attached to analog pins.
5. We added two new objects that let you graph the input of a variable across time and save it to a csv file.
6. We added a new programming mode that lets you compile your scripts and have them running inside the robot, in contrast to running them in the computer and communicate with the robot via bluetooth or usb. We believe this opens a lot of new posibilities for the Physical Etoys users.
7. And finally, we fixed a lot of bugs that make the software a lot more stable (or so we hope :).

I would like to use this opportunity to publicly thank all the people from the Etoys community for their work on Etoys 5, this latest version is much better than the last and I encourage you all to try it.

And also, I would like to announce that Physical Etoys 2.0 is going to be installed by default on all the laptops of the "Conectar igualdad" program, which is kind of like the argentinian version of OLPC (but for older students). So we are *really* excited about this!

Now that you're all as excited as we are :) you can download and try Physical Etoys 2.0 from our blog: http://tecnodacta.com.ar/gira/projects/physical-etoys/.

Cheers,

Richo