Seeed Studio’s XIAO sequence of growth boards contains a tiny (21 x 17.8mm) footprint, together with a variety of capabilities and processing items, making them very best for small embedded tasks. Whereas they are often programmed within the familiar-to-many Arduino IDE, in case you’re completely new to the world of microcontrollers and bodily computing, this might signify a steep studying curve.
Instead, Seeed lately introduced full assist for the MicroBlocks visible programming language! MicroBlocks describes itself as “a free, Scratch-like blocks programming language for studying bodily computing with instructional microcontroller boards.” What’s actually neat about MicroBlocks is that, whereas it’s not the one block-based microcontroller language, it helps each reside programming and autonomous operation. So code adjustments run in your board instantly, and once you unplug it, the gadget nonetheless runs. You possibly can even plug it into one other pc to permit another person to discover your code!
MicroBlocks runs on boards just like the BBC micro:bit and Adafruit Circuit Playground Categorical, and now it’s out there on your complete XIAO household. So when you’ve got one in every of these thumb-sized boards, all it’s essential do to get began is: join it to your pc, open MicroBlocks in a Chrome or Edge browser, set up MicroBlocks firmware, and get coding. Or you possibly can plug in another person’s programmed board to see how their code works!
Extra information is offered on the MicroBlocks Wiki and Seeed Studio’s web page.
