The v1.2 Scratch firmware for the BrainPad went out today, along with v1.0.0.28 of the gateway program. Here’s a walk-through video showing how to install and use Scratch with the BrainPad.
[Edit: Updated video link to a copy with fewer editing screw-ups]
Love it!!! My BrainPads showed up Fri and I can’t wait to try this out. However, I didn’t order the Click boards… @ Gus, how soon until you get it figured out to use the main USB port? Am I going to have to order the Click boards? Any reason a Gadgeteer USB-Serial Module wired to it wouldn’t work as well?
Because I finished it at 2am. I plead delirium and exhaustion. I will create a videos section on the web site and there will be more content as more boards and more tutorials get finished.
Before I had a Click module, I used a Gadgeteer USB client module, 5cm cable, and breakout to create the adapter in the attached image. Don’t wire up 5v or 3v3 - just RX, TX and GND.
Yup - display support, Cerbuino and Gadgeteer are coming next, though I suspect it will be at least a couple weeks as I am clearing a backlog in other projects and getting caught up on life in general.
[Excess detail on the display: The display is a bit of a challenge, because Scratch runs like an immediate-mode graphics program - that is, it runs the program in a continuous loop, so if you put display statements in your program, they would get executed repeatedly and as fast as the loop can run. Updating the display is slow, so that would dramatically slow down the rest of your program, and the display runs like a retained-mode graphics display (whatever you write to it, stays visible). So either the programmer needs to bracket their output with control statements so that it only gets written once (probably too much to ask of new programmers), or the Scratch gateway has to maintain a memory-resident image of the display and then only update changed pixels, thus acting as an immediate-mode to retained-mode translator, and vastly improving performance. Anyway, enabling the display is easy. Making it usable and appropriate for the Scratch programming model is not so easy, which is why I didn’t hold up the release.]
@ mcalsyn - Any chance you have experimented with running this on a VM? I’ve had good luck with almost all of the GHI hardware on VMs to date, and am wondering if your gateway or scratch might throw a (known) wrench into the mix.
If your VM can remote USB and serial, you are good to go. Other than the need to punch through to the hardware with USB and serial, there’s nothing else in there that should cause problems with VMs.
I have used this on a VMWare machine. I have not tried it with HyperV yet (serial should work for sure, but I’m not so sure about deployment. If you can deploy from VS within HyperV, then deployment from Scratch will work too).
[Edit: In other words, anywhere the GHI SDK has worked, this will work too]
I think on or before 8/21 for the display support.
I am also working on a 2.0 version of the gateway program that adds support for Gadgeteer boards, including the Cerbuino boards, Spider and a few others. The biggest change there is support for a minimalist Gadgeteer configuration UI. That work will come out in early September as an early-adopter download, and will become the main download sometime toward the end of Sept.
Obviously, I also need to devote some time to the web site and to building tutorials. I’m a plumber, not a painter, and that really shows in the web site, so if anyone has some aesthetic sense plus ASP and/or bootstrap skills, your contributions would be warmly welcomed.