S4A is a Scratch modification that supports simple programming of the Arduino open source hardware platform. It provides new blocks for managing sensors and actuators connected to Arduino. There is also a sensor report board similar to the PicoBoard.
S4A is compatible with Scratch, thus you can work with Scratch projects and PicoBoard. With the Scratch translation feature, you´ll find it in english, spanish and catalan
It works with Arduino Duemilanove and Diecimila versions, maybe it works with others but we haven´t tested them yet. You can also manage a wireless board if you add a RF module such as Xbee. An important feature is that you can make an interactive project involving as many boards as USB ports you have
S4A interacts with Arduino sending actuators state and receiving sensors state. This information exchange is done every 75 ms using the PicoBoard protocol. To make it possible, there has to be a specific program (called firmware) in the board. You´ll find instructions to upload it through the Arduino environment
Arduino objects offer blocks for the basic microcontroller functionalities, analog and digital writes and reads, and also for higher level ones. You can find a block to choose direction on Parallax continuous rotation servomotors and blocks to stop and start all the actuators.
Creating Arduino objects is available in 3 different ways as in the Scratch environment. You´ll have to choose between creating a new connection or using an already created one (if any). This allows the programmer to work in an object oriented programming paradigm making Arduino virtual objects work collaboratively using the same connection (the physical object).
The connection between the virtual and the physical objects will be established automatically. For the default Arduino object, you must use the right button menu of the sensor board to begin the connection process.
See help menu for more details.
S4A has been developed by Marina conde, Victor Casado, Joan Güell, Jose García and Jordi Delgado with the help of the Smalltalk programming group of Citilab (Barcelona). Please reports bugs and suggestions to Marina Conde Ramos (scratch@citilab.eu). We will thank block translations.
In the project web page you will find videos and we will soon upload the documentation and project examples that will be available from the file menu in future versions.
18th International Smalltalk Joint Conference - Call for Contributions
Barcelona, Spain, September 13 - 17, 2010; Camp Smalltalk September 11-12
This call includes:
For the past 18 years, the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) has organised the International Smalltalk Conference, a lively forum on cutting edge software technologies that attract people from both academia and industry for a whole week. The attendees are both engineers using Smalltalk in business and students and teachers using Smalltalk both for research and didactic purposes.
As every year, this year's edition of the largest European Smalltalk event will include the regular Smalltalk developers conference with renowned invited speakers, a Smalltalk camp that proves fruitful for interactions and discussions. Besides, this year will be held the 6th edition of the Innovation Technology Awards where prizes will be awarded to authors of best pieces of Smalltalk-related projects and an international workshop on Smalltalk and dynamic languages
New this year:
- There will be a business day: thursday 16th of September 2010. The focus will be on Agile Development Processes and Smalltalk.
- ESUG will offer 10 free entrance tickets. To get a free ticket you should send a mail to the esug board (board@esug.org) Subject: [ESUG 2010 Free entrance] + your name and you should write a small motivation.
You can support the ESUG conference in many different ways:
- Sponsor the conference. New sponsoring packages are described here
- Submit a talk, a software or a paper to one of the events.
- Attend the conference. We'd like to beat the previous record of attendance (156 participants at Brest and 170 people at Amsterdam)
- Students can get free registration and hosting if they enroll into the the Student Volunteers program.
Developers Forum: International Smalltalk Developers Conference.
This year we are looking for YOUR experience on using Smalltalk. In addition, we are looking for tutorials. The list of topics includes, but is not limited to the following:
- XP practices
- Development tools
- Experience reports
- Model driven development
- Web development
- Team management
- Meta-Modeling
- Security
- New libraries & frameworks
- Educational material
- Embedded systems and robotics
- SOA and Web services
- Interaction with other programming languages
Submissions due on 1 July 2010 Notification of acceptance on 15 of July 2010 More information here
How to submit?
Pay attention: the places are limited so do not wait till the last minute to apply. Prospective presenters should submit a request to board@esug.org AND stephane.ducasse@free.fr following the template below. Please use this template since the emails will be automatically processed!
Subject: [ESUG 2010 Developers] + your name
First Name:
Last Name:
Email where you can always be reached:
Title:
Abstract:
Bio:
Any presentation not respecting this form will be discarded automatically
Innovation Technology Award
We are proud to announce the 6th Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros during an awards ceremony at the conference. Developers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete. This year we will request 3-5min videos.
Student Volunteer Program
If you are a student wanting to attend ESUG, have you considered being a student volunteer? Student volunteers help keep the conference running smoothly; in return, they have free accommodations, while still having most of the time to enjoy the conference.
We hope to see you there and have fun together.
Hi,
Again, long time since the last entry. Ok, so let's make this clear in case someone did not notice, this is a low activity blog. And the activity will remain low in the foreseeable future.
Now, some news from Barcelona.
We are still active: Marina has almost finished her modification of the Scratch image (no kidding, she is developing with Squeak 2.8) to program Arduino robots with Scratch, Joan tried to port Scratch to Pharo, but it is not easy at all and not a one-person job, so this project is delayed until more people join (but he is learning quite a lot on the inner workings of Squeak!), some of us are still developing the FluidDB API, though the main work up to now has been made by Sergio Garcia, Bernat is in Beijing (China) trying to promote Smalltalk-Pharo among chinese Linux programmers, and Gerard keeps the good work on his UIBuilder. On the other hand, the organization of ESUG'10 has left the back of our head to get a prominent position in our frontal cortex. I mean, we already are working on it.
Besides, the translation of Pharo by Example to spanish has already started, coordinated by Gabriela Arevalo. I am sure we will finish before ESUG'10. It will be a nice novelty.
In a couple of weeks Stéphane Ducasse will visit us, and he will teach a postgraduate course at the UPC (Technical University of Catalonia). Of course, if you are interested in Smalltalk, you are invited to attend.
The course will take place from Monday Feb. 8th to Friday Feb. 12th (every day, 10am to 12am) in the Omega Building, room S216, Campus Nord UPC, Barcelona.
Advanced Object-Oriented Design
Abstract: This lecture will cover advanced design aspect of object-oriented programming, using concrete examples. We will think about what polymorphism deeply implies and its effect on application design. We will revisit the exact semantics of self and super and their impact on frameworks construction. We will present the law of demeter, criteria to assess inheritance versus inheritance, the difference interfaces that a class present, double dispatch as well as some other design points such as the right way to handle preferences in large system. We will also discuss design pattern but in a non traditional way.
I am pretty sure we will have a great time!
Next wednesday, October 14th, there will be a Smalltalk hackaton in Barcelona. It is a joint event with Citilab Breakout and it will take place at WTC Almeda Park in Cornella (here) from 9am to 6pm.
After the summer break, the Smalltalk workgroup in Barcelona decided to invest the spare time of its members (almost none of them is paid to program in Smalltalk) building a Pharo API for a new kind of database: FluidDB. After that, our plans include to develop a Smalltalk application using this new API to make clear the advantages of using FluidDB. The main purpose of this, our first, hackaton will be to push forward this project.
Here you can see a screenshoot of a simple GUI for our first preliminary FluidDB classes that, among other things, allow us to query the sandbox. The GUI was made by Raimon Grau, with Jose Garcia's FluidDB classes and Gerard's -aka nullPointer- UIBuilder. We are a team!
Terry Jones (founder of FluidDB) made clear yesterday, in a private e-mail, his willingness to join us at the hackaton. That would be great, since grasping the full potential of FluidDB is far from trivial.
Anyway, if you are around and want to join us, just do it...
Long time since I wrote something in here, but I've been very busy. With Smalltalk, of course. Anyway, that does not matter. Nothing matters right now, except that, as announced in Brest past friday, the next ESUG Conference will be organized by... US!! The Smalltalk group in Barcelona!! Nothing matters because at the current level of excitement it is very difficult to pay attention to anything else.
First of all, I would like to thank Stéphane Ducasse, the ESUG board and the Brest conference organizers for such a great event. It was my first ESUG conference, but if people attending next ESUG at Barcelona enjoys the conference as much as I enjoyed the conference at Brest, I will be very, very happy.
We are a very young and strongly motivated group of Smalltalk enthusiasts, though I know that that does not compensate our lack of experience with Smalltalk. This lack of experience was clearly apparent at Brest, where I could see what Smalltalk experts are currently doing. That was amazing! Just let me mention the submissions to the Innovation Technology Awards, and the winner, Retrobjects by Gabriel Honoré. However, just seeing what we can accomplish if we keep on learning and programming gave a boost to our enthusiasm.
Of course, I am aware that the place, Barcelona, and not my/our Smalltalk merits, was what mostly determined the choice of the next ESUG event. That, and the delicious dinner we had with some of the members of the ESUG board, where I guess they realized that our proposal was not completely crazy. I thank them a lot the trust they have put in our group.
We'll be back with a small document introducing ourselves to the Smalltalk community.