Arduino Alternative to Hummingbird

[Joshua Gold]

Hello!

I have 5 hummingbird kits and they are great, but very expensive!  Does anyone know if seedstudios grove system works with snap/scratch?  I have 20 arduino boards and would prefer to just get grove shields since then we could transition to actual c programming in 7th/8th after 5th/6th did projects in snap/scratch.

Thanks!

[Ryan Barnes]

The Makeblock Orion works great with their Scratch based 'mBlock' app, and is plug and play with the RJ connectors. The ' makeblock inventors kit' is still fairly pricey, but the Radioshack stock is readily available on eBay for less then half the retail: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Makeblock-Inventor-Electronic-Kit-Bluetooth-Brand-New-Free-Shipping-/291417002703?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item43d9ce92cf

I've been happy with their robotics kits as well.

-Ryan

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Ryan Barnes

Drexel University, College of Engineering

215-262-6792

www.thelowtech.com

[Jaymes Dec]

You can also try this littleBits Scratch/Arduino extension. 

It works with regular Arduino Uno too: https://github.com/khanning/scratch-littlebits-extension

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Jaymes Dec
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[Trevor Shaw]

At DE, we like the Arduino Little Bit module, and we combine it with Ardublock, which is a scratch-like graphic programming interface that translates the GUI program into Arduino Code, which is then uploaded to the Bit. There is a little bits library for Ardublock, so you can drag blocks for buttons and sound triggers into your program.

The array of sensors and actuators in the little bits library plug easily into the Arduino bit. The only down-side to LBits is the cost.

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/alternative-arduino-interfaces/ardublock

Trevor

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[Andrew]

I've played with mBlock extensively for the last two weeks and really like the experience. It has programmed bare uno/Leo compatible boards and Lilypad Simple straight from the scratch GUI. 

Dumping from the Scratch interface Into the Arduino IDE has allowed us to use Teensy boards, with their weird uploaded, as well. 

The grove boards should absolutely work in mBlock. 

--andrew

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[Angi Chau]

We use the Grove shields here on top of Arduinos and they work great. Our 6th graders (that's the youngest we have here) find them easy to use and have lots of fun with them.

We've been doing the programming with Ardublock mostly but I'm planning to investigate some of these other programming options this summer when I have some downtime (ha!).

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Angi Chau, PhD
Director of Bourn Idea Lab, Faculty Advisor for Robotics @ Castilleja School
650-470-7756 (direct)
ac...@castilleja.org

WOMEN LEARNING  |  WOMEN LEADING

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[Joshua Gold]

Thanks everyone for the input!  The mBot coming out from kickstarter looks great, but definitely nervous about timing doing a kickstarter (one item is 2 years behind!).  $50 robot kit: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1818505613/mbot-49-educational-robot-for-each-kid

Grove shields definitely seem to have the best bang for buck since I already have the arduino's!

[Jaymes Dec]

You can download and use mBlock right now with arduino: http://mblock.cc/

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[David Malpica]

I just started looking at mBot and could use some guidance. Would you guys mind posting or discussing some examples? What are the equivalents of void setup() and void loop()? Are they no longer needed?

Thanks!

[David Malpica]

Ok, so I figured out there is an Arduino mode under Edit. What's the equivalent of the serial monitor? Or can I somehow output to the scratch screen?

[Ryan Barnes]

When I last used it, you would either be outputting data to the Scratch screen, or creating an Arduino program (so either having a 'When Flag Clicked' or an 'Arduino Program' starting block) but you are not able to do both. That being said, you can always observe the serial monitor through something like PuTTY: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html after you program through MBlock...you could actually use the Arduino IDE's serial monitor as well.

-Ryan

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[David Malpica]

Thanks Ryan! Ok, so this was not as bad as I had imagined, but I got this simple On-Off button code to work. It looks like it adds the servo library and variables by default. One thing I found odd is in Arduino mode it blocks access to some of the blocks like "If-Then" so you'll have to go back to "Scratch" mode to add those to the program.