An online project development platform

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) General Exhibition
1

Hi my name is Claudio, i am from Chile and i began using Arduino on 2006, since that year i started a very ambitious web platform, where you can create arduino projects visually, from conections to testing, including visual programming
For a lot of time the project was just a dream, but since i won a small price on September 2008 i began to code it together with and ex univerity professor.
For many reasons, specially economic ones, we had to stop working on the platform, currently the project is in stand by.

The project is called conexo and you can see it at www.conexo.org, the user is conexotester@gmail.com and the password is test, it is still in a early beta or even alpha stage.

I wrote this in order to know if there is somple people interested in it, or if they wan't to be part of the development or just talk about it, the truth is that even with all the engeniering and coding behind the project was created with more hope and ingenuity than knowledge.

Here you can read the project brochure: http://www.clcastro.com/conexo.pdf.
You can contact me at clcastro@flowde.com or to yayolius@gmail.com

Thanks to all the comunity

Claudio A. Castro
Cs. Engenier

2

This is actually very impressive! so what made you want to start this project, anyhow? it seems like a rather large undertaking. I can see this being immensely helpful for anyone starting out, or artists that don't want to get too involved in electronics. Overall it seems like a very solid project, but needs a few tweaks and improvements/expansions (no plain resistors on the parts list?). If you can keep developing it, I'd be very excited to see where it can go.

3

I have sent my email for a beta invitation.

This sounds interesting but I also think it would be a big undertaking.

Mowcius

4

Nice!

Interesting project. :wink:

5

well the UI is divided in 5 steps

The first is where you declarate connection, by the moment you just are telling to the platform where the pins were be connected to the arduino, that is why you don't see resistors or capacitors. The idea was to create a way to automaticly describe the circuit necesary to connect the "component" but the lack of electronics knowledge let me represent the pin connections.

The second part is visual programming, by now is based on an event action declaration, a button or any other sensors triggers events, so you cand declare what to do when that ocurrs.

The third would be the emulation, the ieda is to graphicly represent the circuit and program running directly in flash without the need to compile it or download to your board.

The fourth is where you can copy and paste all the automatic generated code, by now it is far from be optimized.

ANd the fifth part you can se all the things that you need to create the project and where you can find them online.

The fun part is that al the methods and connections are declared using an small xml format that we have just created for the project.
Here you can see the definition of 2 components, a LED and a Microbutton http://www.clcastro.com/fc.rar

6

This looks awesome!

What countries will the buy part work in? I live in the uk and would love to be able to use the pricing and purchaseing section.

7

This is interesting, but it seems like it would be limited to fairly simple projects and programs, until "wire-clutter" set in. I would like to say it would be of benefit to "newbies", but I tend to feel that it won't, because it would obscure a lot about what happens in electronics, interfacing, and software development, that is ultimately important if you need to do anything complex or interesting - as well as to being safe without burning up your Arduino or other components.

For experts, such a system would be nice (in a certain degree) to remove the clutter of a system in prototyping, but it still feels a little limited to me. For it to be ultimately useful, you would want it to generate a schematic, netlists, PCB traces, etc - but if you are at a point in your skills where you understand all of this, you are probably already using Eagle or something anyhow.

The one place where this kind of a tool does have value, though, as Lego has learned, is with children. So I can see this kind of a tool being useful for introducing and teach children how to use an Arduino. However, if they are to then transistion into really understanding microcontrollers, schematics, electronics, and programming, it will be soon after using a tool like this (or they might get stunted - really, these visual flow diagrams are in some ways worse than BASIC for teaching programming skills).

Seeing something like this, though - I wonder why nobody has created a ladder-logic visual environment for the Arduino (I guess not much call for it - they certainly don't use it anymore in the industry; but I wonder if it could still be a useful teaching tool)...?

It will be interesting to see where you take this (and interesting to see how this is received by the community, compared to Fritzing, compared to Eagle, compared to gEDA, compared to...).

:slight_smile: