Blockly Windows 10 IoT

Using a Google tool to build your next Raspberry Pi Windows 10 app? Yep, here's how...

Windows 10 IoT Core Blockly

In this blog post you’ll learn about IoT Core Blockly, a new UWP application that allows you to program a Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 and a Raspberry Pi Sense Hat using a “block” editor from your browser:

You create a program with interlocking blocks, which will run on the Raspberry Pi. For example, you can control the LED matrix on the Sense Hat and react to the inputs (buttons, sensors like temperature, humidity, etc.).

IoT Core Blockly was inspired by these other super interesting projects:

• BBC micro:bit and the block editor (check out io as well)
• Google Blockly open source block editor
• Raspberry Pi Sense Hat (and the handy C# NuGet library from EmmellSoft)
• Microsoft Chakra JavaScript engine

In this blog post, we will show you how to set up your Raspberry Pi with IoT Core Blockly and get coding with blocks.

Also, we’ll open the hood and look at how we implemented IoT Core Blockly leveraging Windows 10 IoT Core, Google Blockly, the Sense Hat library and the Chakra JavaScript engine.

Set up IoT Core Blockly on your Raspberry Pi

What you will need:

• A Raspberry Pi 2 or 3
• A Raspberry Pi Sense Hat
• A clean SD Card (at least 8 Gb) to install Windows IoT Core 10 Insider Preview
• A computer or laptop running Windows 10, to install the IoT Dashboard

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Under the hood

How does IoT Core Blockly work? How did we build it?

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Next steps

IoT Core Blockly is a functional sample, but we think we can do more. For example:

• add more support for colors,
• add support for sounds,
• add support for voice (speech and speech recognition),
• add more blocks for GPIO, ADC, PWM, SPI, I2C,
• add blocks for other “hats” (for example, the GrovePi),
• send/Receive data to/from the cloud, over BT, etc.,
• leverage the io environment,
• improve the stability of the web server.

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Don’t forget, IoT Core Blockly code is here on GitHub, and we gladly accept help, contributions and ideas!

... [You are going to really want to read the whole post]

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