Which is the best embedded visual programming software? (introduction, evaluation and selection of visual programming platform) [scratch, mind+, mixly]

Preface

“ Everyone should learn to program , Because he taught you how to think .”

—— Steve jobs

As an embedded little white , I always thought , If the underlying hardware drivers and the construction of the programming environment are regarded as a lot of work in the study life , That person's creativity will be wiped out , Because he has lost his fighting spirit in a lot of low-level configurations .

This is why compared to 51 SCM and stm32 For the standard library ,stm32cubemx Will be pursued by a large number of developers . Compared with these two popular embedded development platforms , Now it's even hotter Arduino The reason why the platform and some derivative platforms gradually win a large number of users in the embedded field and maker field .

So , Happened to be in yesterday B I saw a small video on the station , Compared from 51 MCU to arduino Visual programming students' feelings , Suddenly embedded visual programming came into my little world .

Today, I began to search a large number of embedded visual programming software on the Internet , At the same time, I have made some understanding of the past and present life of visual programming .

Here is the body

One 、 The past and present of visual programming

Here is a brief introduction to the past and present of visual programming ,

That year Google and MIT Cooperation has established a App Inventor project , later MIT Quit one of my own Scratch Online programming platform , You can write all kinds of animation , but Scratch Hardware programming is not supported by itself .

later Google It's out Blockly Graphical programming library , Provide developers to develop various graphical programming software based on their libraries . Now in Blockly On the official website ,Scratch and App Inventor Also used Blockly The core .

The software mentioned above is open source , Include Blockly kernel , So in recent years, there are many evidences Blockly Visual programming software developed by kernel , Some of them are ：Ardublock、S4A、Webduino、mBlock、 Have a good time 、Mixly、KenRobot、Mind+……

Two 、  Choice of visual programming platform

Of course? , The above list may not represent all , If there are visual programming software that students like to use, you can put it forward in the comment area below .

Not all the platforms listed above can be used , Some officials have stopped updating , Some are in a state of dying , After a lot of data collection , I only experienced three kinds of software , Namely Scratch、Mind+ and Mixly.

（ First of all, let's make a statement , I didn't take any advertising money , All the words are my subjective expression XD.）

1、Scratch

among Scratch Well , It is a mobile phone installed on the mobile phone before APP, The user experience is pretty good , But it does not support hardware programming , As the main business is embedded development , It can only be reserved for children in the future . Animation editing does not require a lot of learning costs , You can learn some programming thinking and quickly cultivate your interest in programming （ There is no trouble at the bottom and hardware layer ）.

2、Mind+

   The software consists of DFRobot Its subsidiary brand mushroom cloud maker Education released , It can be converted automatically Python/C/C++ Other languages . A software can be used for animation programming and hardware programming , You can design the animation , Carry out physical programming , It should be a very convenient tool for the training institution of children's programming education .

  Personally, I think , His interface color matching is better than that of animated villains Scratch well done , May be more popular with children .

But his pain point is also the reason why I didn't introduce him at the end , The development versions that he supports are DFRobot The development board on your own platform , The supported sensor and actuator expansion boards belong to DFRobot

 3、Mixly 

Mixly（ Miszi ） It is an open source software developed by the maker education laboratory team of Beijing Normal University , His interface color and the front-end of the official website do not Mind+ well done , However, the supported hardware boards are very rich

I haven't used their own series of products , But it also supports STM32F103 It's something I didn't think of

 

There are also some expansion cards , Their update speed is very frequent , So I put one in the downloaded installation package “ One click Update .bat” The batch file is used to quickly obtain the officially released update package , The support of other hardware platforms is also very comprehensive , I have a piece at hand ESP32-WROOM Tried it on WIFI Connect , No information was inquired , Ready to use . 

3、 ... and 、 About recent configurations ESP32 Programming environment and Mixly Sigh with emotion

1、ESP32 Environment configuration

although ESP32 have access to Arduino Programming , Compared with what I used before STM32 It's enough for “ Hommization ” 了 , But this visualization can reduce a lot of time spent on code .

If you use arduino Official platform , Need to download ESP32 The support library of can be used , I remember when I was trying to configure ESP32 It also took a lot of time , Because the download speed on the official software is very slow , So my own Github The previous one can only be used after downloading the library file and putting it in the specified directory .

and arduino The official version of the editor cannot jump to some common operations such as definitions , Even if it's arduino2.0 It's not easy to use , Once I was still VScode Installed on arduino Support package , But every time you load a project, you need to VScode Add the file path to the configuration file of , At that time in C Under the ten layer folder of the disk, I am frantically looking for files and file headers containing . Later, I found that I could esp32 Add... After the header folder of “**” After that, you can configure the following files , But what? , Because the header file descriptions conflict with each other, it is necessary to subdivide the contents .

Later, it was also used VScode Inside Platformio add to ESP32 The library of , It's very easy to use .

There is also the recent configuration in Linux The following configuration OpenCV Environment , Write an article to share , You can refer to Linux Next OpenCV Successful installation and testing tutorial （ solve E: Unable to locate package libjasper-dev、 Unable to find directory `opencv.pc‘、fatal error:“highgui.h“)_Boxjod The blog of -CSDN Blog

2、 About Mixly Some of my feelings

But this Mixly Well , Library files are almost one click installed , Even the port number didn't let me choose , You can directly compile and download , It's like a stupid plug-in line , Drag a few blocks , Click download to use .

Even better, there are Mixly The component package of , You can directly visualize how all function functions should be written , Modules directly correspond to common programming code patterns , For example, the blocking loop connected , If it's not connected, it's always in that loop , The code is more standard than the code I wrote .

Personally feel Mixly This software is very useful for arduino For a series of products, why not use advanced applications . 

 

  I learned it a few days ago MQTT and Blynk Network components in Mixly It looks so intuitive and simple

  Four 、 ending

In the future, there may be some special about Mixly Creative works and articles , Thank you for reading this article and paying attention to me , Your time is the most beautiful compliment to me ！