XiBot Is On The Drawing Board

As a summer project, I am planning on building a simple Raspberry PI 3 based robotic vehicle using XideKit for the control transport. To control and monitor the little beast,  I have cobbled together a tkinter GUI that currently looks like this:

Tkinter made it fairly easy to create ( the logic to connect the GUI to the hardware is still a work in progress) and my hope is that with the aid of XideKit, I can attach this GUI to either my custom little robot, a Sparkfun RedBot, or any other robot for that matter (with a XideKit adapter of course).without having to change one line of GUI code. In fact the GUI allows you to select up to 3 robots to control no matter what the platform (the XiBot is a Raspberry PI device and the RedBot is Arduino based).

Tkinter meets almost all of my needs for a GUI. The code is relatively easy to write, tkinter is included as a standard part of Python, and as a result will run on Windows, Mac or Linux. Mobile devices on the other hand are not readily supported. If you know of a way to run tkinter on an Android or iOS device, please let me know. And so, I already have a "Phase 2" planned using a Python based GUI library called Kivy. Kivy applications can be run on mobile devices as well as desktop operating systems. To this end, I have cobbled together the following Kivy GUI that is similar to the center panel of tkinter effort.

I was able to create this in about 3 hours, so I am hopeful that I will be able to complete it to support all of the features of its tkinter cousin, and also be able to run on an Android tablet or phone from a single set of source files.

I will post my progress as this project progresses.

This is going to be busy summer.

Xideco 0.5.0 Released

Learn How to Easily Create Your Own Network Distributed Applications With

The XideKit API Class

This release includes the XideKit API class that encapsulates ZeroMQ and MessagePack operations. A tutorial for using XideKit is available here. Examples with videos are provided. You can view the example code here and view the API here.

BUG ALERT IN SCRATCH 2.0 EDITOR

Update

Scratch version 445.1 almost fixes the issue. If you create a new project using extension blocks and save the project, you can reopen the new project without issue. However, if you have a project you saved previous to version 443 and load that project, the extension blocks still are shown as undefined. This is being investigated and documented here.

Here is an example of what I mean. The lone Digital Pin block was added and saved with version 445.1.

BUG ALERT IN SCRATCH 2.0 EDITOR

Recent updates to the Scratch editor prevent any project created using extension blocks to be saved and reopened. When reopening the project, all of the extensions blocks turn red and are labeled as undefined.

This is a known bug: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/188451/?page=1#post-1856641

Let's hope the Scratch folks fix it soon!