Implementação de melhorias na plataforma BIPES e no SNEK para microcontroladores de pequeno porte

Abstract

The way you learn a subject is as important as the subject itself. It is necessary that the new content is presented in such a way that the person won’t find resistance to make the connections and judgments needed to develop knowledge. That’s why teaching Computer Science, an area of great importance nowadays, has met some obstacles. There are barriers that one faces when they start learning programming, like dealing with hard-to-learn programming languages. Visual programming is seen as an interesting alternative to help lower these difficulties, and for that a lot of platforms have been using this resource to ease the learning problem in their field. BIPES (Block-based Integrated Platform for Embedded Systems) is an open source platform that uses block programming to make learning and developing solutions with embedded devices easy. The platform has a lot of easy to handle blocks that span through many different topics, for many different types of boards, sensors and actuators. Expanding the capacity of this platform is desired, giving even more possibilities for computer newbies to be able to build applications for embedded systems. This expansion can happen by adding support to new types of boards, like Arduino, a board that was not supported up until recently, but was added to BIPES due to the introduction of a new extremely lightweight Python-inspired programming language called Snek. This project aims to widen BIPES capabilities by making a new block design to control a servo motor using an Arduino board programmed with Snek code. The block can be used to incorporate monitoring and controlling the servo motor through IoT (Internet of Things) and was validated by random users with and without prior programming experience as being really easy to use.