Yes you are right, yet for the non-coder target group it seems less scary like that ;)
I always thought that 'scratch' gets rather complex rather quickly and hence that the IFTTT approach might be easier to understand for someone who is not familiar to programming in general.
Agreed - I wouldn’t say scratch is particularly similar, especially when I consider your visual analogies feature. It’s just another example of something that is really just a different form of code.
Hey Oliver, looks interesting! Any reason it's not available as a web app? It looks like it's HTML/JS anyway? At least going off your alpha code on github.
That would be helpful for students who often aren't able to install software on school computers, people who have chromebooks, or people like me who don't like running native apps unless they're sandboxed somehow.
In any case, I hope you're successful here - very exciting project!
Hey! Thanks a lot for the appreciation!
Yes, as we need access to the serial port to connect with the Arduino, we currently need to rely on a native app, the browser does not allow us to do so at the moment. If this would be the case in the future, we would consider this of course as well.
There's an on-going origin trial of the web serial API - https://web.dev/serial/ - if you can get a token you could probably run the code in a browser (specifically Chrome at the moment).
I wrote small webserver for proxying serial port requests from the browser to solve a similar problem about 10 years ago. It's not generic enough for what you're doing, but something similar would be quick to code.
Yes, we are working on it for Windows at least. As we are doing this project on the side, I unfortunately am not able to tell you when the Windows version would be released.
A PWA is not possible at the moment due to the missing access to the serial ports, but once this is granted, we intend it as well!
This might be what gets me to pull the trigger on tinkering with hardware, between this and the JS on firmware project I saw on HN, I've definitely felt the call recently!
It really is quite nice aesthetically and functionally. If you're on the market for a great web experience, I'd love to offer help. Feel free to reach out to my gmail, via Gabrielmtn.
wow team massively well done this looks amazing. today has been busy but i've been checking out the site and i can't wait to fire up a board and get started.
will report back. site looks slick and product looks absolutely brilliant
I actually think it could also be rather useful for some IoT things. Things where all you want is a relatively basic connection between two electrical components.
I carry a stock of ESP32's at home for stuff that falls into a domain where this might be useful, especially if this has the ability to convert a given signal into a stream of MQTT messages. This seems marginally easier than firing up a new esp-idf project (although that's possibly because I haven't built up the muscle memory to have the right GPIO incarnations stored).
The code export is probably the killer feature here, so when you get to the point where working in the GUI is limiting, you can export it and switch to editing source code. I don't have a Mac handy, I'm curious what the export looks like. Is every card a different file? Is there an event loop that "listens" for these events? Or does it just generate a big main function?
When exporting the code, every card is built into an own function, all in one file. The eventListeners are created on board setup. It is using the johnny-five API → http://johnny-five.io/api/
However, it just doesn’t ring true to say this is building prototypes without code.
“If Button is pressed times, then LED should switch on” is code!
This is essentially a graphical scripting language, in the vein of something like ‘scratch’ but with much nicer visuals.