On 25-02-2015, at 6:19 AM, David Corking <lists at dcorking.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 9:17 AM, Kirk Fraser <overcomer.man at gmail.com> wrote
> 
>>> 3) The Raspberry Pi has many pins to connect electronics to.  Supporting
>>> those could potentially provide control for many projects for children and
>>> adults.
> 
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 3:15 AM, Casey Ransberger
> <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 3) Yeah, that's cool. I bet there are already people doing stuff like this.
> 
> I have read that there is a version of Scratch that controls Raspberry
> Pi GPIO pins for input and output. See:
> 
> http://simplesi.net/scratchgpio/scratch-raspberrypi-gpio/

Si’s  scratchGPIO is a python sorta-server app that listens to the Scratch broadcasts and handles all sorts of wild and whacky cases. It also broadcasts back sensor values etc. It’s pretty damn clever, although the code is, well, a bit grungy in places. It’s also Python. I’m not a huge fan of vast chunks of text in files. And whitespace being the major syntactical determinant of semantics? Eek. There’s also a bundle of Python based stuff from Pridopia in the uk to support there range of add-on boards.

I know of several people working on more direct gpio/pi access - Doug, Marten, Herbert, me - from Squeak and/or scratch. I have a fairly nicely working demo that can do basic gpio pin control and i2c device support for PiGlow/PiFace etc. Doing things in squeak allows some options not available to any outside code such as providing lists of understood broadcasts & variables, UI access etc.

Anyone interested in the latest state of scratch on squeak can try running the current Pi release -

https://copy.com/lmzI1gwLrdfYuxzf

Obviously it runs on all modern platforms. To get behind the friendly facade, shift-click on the top half of the $R in ‘Scratch’ and choose ‘turn fillscreen off’.

For robot specific stuff there is (or at least was) Enchanting, a variant that has lots of ‘bot stuff. And there is  ‘S4A’ that provides scratchy arduino programming tools. And there is Phratch, which is a pharo image with scratch stuff and a lot of interesting extensions.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: HEM: Hide Evidence of Malfunction