I have been looking at a graphical product which allows people who wish to use PIC micro's etc, without having to learn a language. This was to allow some designers to get a taste of what is possible. I was really surprised at what is possible to be done without prior work in this field. Anyone else had any experience with this sort of thing ?

 

You'll have to learn a language, but there are plenty to choose from.
IMO Swordfish BASIC is very easy, similar to the old BASIC Stamp but much more powerful.

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Bill
Smart Kits build Smart People
http://www.blueroomelectronics.com

 

nope, take a look at this stuff :-

http://www.matrixmultimedia.com/Flowcode3a-X.php

I normaly code in .ASM and lately C, but needed to find something for newbies to use. I was surprised how quickly they created their first program. What do you think of the product ?

 

I'll take a look at it, wonder what the demo limitations are?

Edit: I've just installed the demo version, limited PIC support (about 8 PICs, is this a demo limitation?) and it appears to be designed for their EBlocks system.

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Bill
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Yup. The limitation is due to the demo version but the full version does support a large range (listed on their site)

 

My $2 worth.

If the goal is to teach a HLL, present some good examples in that language but hide the details. Give them a set of functions they can call and let them play. You end up with the same result without the "yet another tool" detour.

I have done this a few times and have been pleased with the results.

In one case a young student was into music. I setup a framework where she used the uC to play music by calling a note function. She learned to plug in the right values to sound notes. Within the context of music I was able to introduce flow control and parameters. Also MPLAB and the C compiler.

The same sort of thing can be done with may different topics.

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Junebug USB PIC programmer kit., USB Bit Wacker, 3v0's Homepage
The 15 Minute Printed Circuit Board! (+drill time)

 

The only thing I have played with that is like this is the Lego Mindstorms system and I found that appalling. These (so called) systems are so limited that they quickly become useless. I'm with 3v0, setup a framework that students can learn in and then they will gradually go beyond it.

Mike.

 

I've got a pair of the original Mindstorms RCX kits, couldn't stand the flowchart style interface that came with it.

That said we all have different views on such things, for some a graphical interface might be what it takes to "hook" the student. In my day the hook was BASIC.

If Flowcode supported the 18F1320 in the demo version I'd consider it for an issue of JPUG.

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Bill
Smart Kits build Smart People
http://www.blueroomelectronics.com

 

Once they are hooked on the graphic tool they will be unhappy about using the HLL. Better to dumb down the HLL to where it is easy to use.

As always everyone is free to do as the please.

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Junebug USB PIC programmer kit., USB Bit Wacker, 3v0's Homepage
The 15 Minute Printed Circuit Board! (+drill time)

 

My thought is that it is great for people who already 'do' electronics and want to get into 'higher' stuff by integrating their knowledge with the ability to use micros. Why use a 555 when a simple flow chart and '628 can do it ? How many guys do you know who would love to do this but choke at the idea of learning 'programming'

 

None that I know of. Why go to the trouble of learning a flowchart skillset that will be very tightly tied with a certain device when you can learn to the skills to code which will carry over to other devices? Personally I wouldn't go flowchart anything unless I planned for that to be the maximum depth that I would ever delve into the particular computing device, or concepts that I want to blindly use but never ever plan to learn (like SimuLink blocks), or FPGA core blocks, or other thing that are just way too complicated.

I find comprehensive block diagrams (like the kinds required to tell a microcontroller what to do, and not those for human interpretation where you can leave out implicit things, which may also be low-level or bottom-level making things even worse) are incredibly hard to follow- especially for larger or more complex processes. Flowcharts are good as an intro to young kids who don't have the capacity or attention span to learn code yet or those that don't bother to go any farther, but if they are capable of learning the code they should be learning the code and not the flow chart.

But doesn't PICAXE already have something like this?

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Something like LabView? The closest thing I found for PICs would be the ladder logic programming, and even that requires some knowledge of basic circuits. I know that ARMs have LabView programmers, but they are extremely expensive.

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My opinion? A complete waste of time.

asm/C/etc are not hard to learn. They're well supported. The tools are often free.

You go with some oddball product with all these claims, you're still going to have to learn how to use the product. In the end it's limited what you can do with it and the knowledge gained is nearly useless since it's all product-specific.

Parallax spent a lot of marketing to give people the impression that C or asm were too hard for an introductory user, and you needed their expensive BASIC Stamp product to get started. I believe this is misinformation.

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I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.

 

Title the post as "WYSIWYG For Microcontrollers". This is a graphical user interface to an underlying system. Web page design programs have their WYSIWYGs. Microcontrollers now have their growing WYSIWYGs as well it seems. PSOC? Good for on the go common practical purposes and making the middle man some money to ease the efforts of its customer base. Band aid.

Now if you are a pioneer, the one who does the uncommon, the one needing direct control mandated by the purity of your inventive process, you can rely on the native language of what ever you are accessing. In this case Assembly will be the cure. "Nothing exist outside the realm of opcode and operand" - Me

 

OK - got my answer. I tested it out on a small group of radio hams that were itching to build things with uP's and being 'old school' were not keen to try. It was a resounding success and they can now use this technology, I also took time to explain to them that they can embed both C and ASM into it when they get more confident. Thanks for the input, it's interesting to read constructive criticisim.