iseailab / flowblocks

Cambridge IB Group Project for the Raspberry Pi Foundation

FlowBlocks

FlowBlock.Presentation.mp4

Introduction

FlowBlocks is a visual interface for programming the Raspberry Pi Pico, geared towards beginners.

With FlowBlocks, users can build programs by dragging and dropping blocks from a comprehensive standard library of inputs, operators, and outputs, and connecting them into flowcharts, which describe the flow of data throughout a program. In addition, experienced users also have the option of creating custom blocks—written with a templating dialect of MicroPython—which provide a greater level of expressive freedom for the projects that need it.

Development

Installing dependencies

Install Node.js and the project manager Yarn. Most of FlowBlocks' dependencies can then be installed with:

yarn

FlowBlocks also requires Emscripten, which should be installed via the emsdk. On Windows, the C++ build process also requires POSIX tools such as sed, which can be installed via MSYS2 or a package manager of your choice, except for make, which can be installed via Chocolatey (MSYS2's make cannot use the cmd shell, which is required to have paths compatible with llvm-ar) . Alternatively, you can use WSL.

Installing development tools

clang-format can be installed with NPM.

Building WebAssembly modules

To compile the C++ module to WebAssembly:

cd cxx
make all

Starting a development server

To build the application and run a local server for development:

yarn run dev