Do you folks ever found any Bubble-like application but in order to program Arduino or something like it?
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Could checkout control of Arduino from Scratch but this is more like automating an arduino, not generating code for it - http://playground.arduino.cc/Interfacing/Scratch
If they have an API it’s something we can look at integrating it. If the API is standard (REST, JSON, etc.), it’s usually not too bad to add. I know littlebits has one, but it’s more a toy for kids.
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Bubble would be nice to use in Education btw. Learning through Playing (or “Learning with Rules”, “Making/Evolving your own Rules” etc.) is quite active area in Education Research.
What Scratch 2.x does is that they allow you to install new command blocks by loading in some text format that defines the commands you invoke on a local HTTP server (it’s like functions since Scratch has blocks that have holes in them for parameters). The HTTP server represents the implementation of those custom blocks and returns back results for those custom blocks that return a value. I think it is REST-based.
That HTTP server can be either local or remote I think (although a remote one would take more time to respond) and it can either do some calculations or talk to hardware or do something on the PC (e.g. talk to a Kinect sensor)
Various educational toys / robots etc., or third parties are starting to provide such services and custom block definitions (or others write such and put on GitHub for example), so Bubble could probably have some plugin that accepts such Scratch command block file and exposes them as custom events. Not sure if calling a custom event (which can accept a parameter [can it accept more than one?) can return you a value though currently in Bubble
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That’s a good idea, and yes, Bubble can return a value, through this action https://bubble.io/reference#API.workflow_api.APIReturnData, and can take more than one parameter.
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what I mean is would those custom blocks be exposed as Custom Events? those can’t return a value, can they?
now that I think of it, maybe best is that once you install the plugin you have a ScratchBlocks Type that you can instantiate and pass it the scratch blocks definition format (in a text field it has)
Found some reference, it’s the HTTP Extensions for Scratch 2.0 offline editor I was talking about:
http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_Extension#HTTP_Extensions
the Scratch 2.0 offline editor btw is here
(bit hidden from the main site navigation)
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I know you can get it to work with a node.js server running web sockets. So you can cross the languages barrier (C to js). It was not a big project.
I will be doing this with bubble but it may be a year or more from now.