Thanks a lot Ricardo, seems pretty interesting... I have stared
it on GitHub.
Cheers,
Offray
On 23/1/19 11:10, Ricardo Moran wrote:
Hi everybody,
For a long time we've been wanting to show you what we
are working on at GIRA (
http://tecnodacta.com.ar/gira/)
and although we're still far from finished we've decided
it's time to share our little project with the community.
As some of you may know we work mostly on developing
tools to facilitate the use of robots for education. We
published Physical Etoys as part of that work. Now we are
working on a new programming environment that attempts to
fix some common problems we see in most of the tools
available for educational robotics.
We call this environment UziScript and it consists of a
small VM that runs on an Arduino, a web server that runs
on your computer, and a set of web tools that use the web
server to connect and program the Arduino. We're focusing
on Arduino UNO for now (mainly because it's very popular
and accessible) but we plan to support other boards in the
future.
UziScript has a few cool features:
- Block-based and text-based programming: It
includes a block-based programming language suitable
for beginners but it also supports text-based
programming for more advanced users. To ease the
transition UziScript automatically generates the
textual code from the blocks (and viceversa).
- Concurrency: Most educational robotics
projects require the implementation of a device that
performs two or more simultaneous tasks. UziScript
allows the definition of concurrent tasks that will be
executed independently from each other.
- Autonomy: UziScript programs are stored and
executed autonomously in the Arduino without requiring
a connection to the computer.
- Interactive programming: If the board is
connected to the computer UziScript allows to inspect
and monitor the program state while it runs.
Furthermore, every change made to the program can be
automatically compiled and transmitted to the Arduino,
which allows to see the effects of the change almost
immediately.
- Debugging: Without debugging tools the
process of fixing programming errors can be
frustrating for an inexperienced user. UziScript's
debugger provides mechanisms for error handling and
step-by-step code execution.
We're still not ready to use this with actual teachers
and students (we have a LOT of bugs and unfinished
features) but we think we're ready to show this to other
programmers.
Have fun!
Richo
Locked
