Reverse-Engineering Bloxter? (for use in "curl'd" environments)

[jimrh]

Forking the discussion from Carl Is Learning To Follow Walls:

@jimrh

Maybe this should be Charlie’s next project?
“How to implement Blockly on a curl’d GoPiGo install over something like Legacy Raspbian - and make it work with the bot.”

Famous last words. . . .

@jimrh

@cyclicalobsessive

Wall following just seemed simple (too close turn away from wall, too far turn toward wall) until I actually tried to do it. . .

Or as Bugs Bunny would say: “I’m diyyyyin!” - this sooo reminds me of what I thought when I started the New Remote Camera Robot. “All I gotta do is substitute a joystick for the mouse, how difficult can that be?”

 

Here’s Blockly:

Blockly  |  Google Developers

Importing Blockly/Bloxter into a non-GoPiGo O/S appears to be a non-trivial exercise and I’m sure that we won’t be seeing much help from Nicole!

My money’s on there being a NDA or such involved, and the Dexter/MR people are being very close-mouthed about it all.

For one thing, it’s designed to run within a browser context and is 99 and 44/100% pure JavaScript.

Doable?  Absolutely!  (It’s been done before by the DI/MR people).

Reasonably simple?  Possibly not.

Looking at the Google stuff about Blockly makes me wonder.  What I will have to do is to download and install the dev environment and see what I can figure out on my own and then figure out what I can copy over from a working GoPiGo O/S install.

Once I get a dev install up and running - then I will see what I can and cannot do.

There is the very real risk of totally upsetting everyone at MR, especially Nicole.  Upsetting her would be A Bad Thing for more reasons than I care to imagine - only slightly less upsetting than the war in the Ukraine.

I would particularly want to avoid doing anything that would cause her grief - but on the other hand, reverse engineering Bloxter is a chewy, (make that read “interesting”), project.

[jimrh]

Update:

The more I look into Blockly, the more I am convinced that implementing a version of it on Raspbian is a project of absolutely non-trivial scope - non trivial as in my “new remote camera robot” project non-trivial.

Issues:

1. It is designed to run in a browser context, as a consequence it is virtually 100% JavaScript - and therefore must be run in a browser.

2. Many features seem to want a server-client context in the same way the GoPiGo interface uses a built-in web server to provide the GoPiGo functionality - including Bloxter.

3. The documentation, even the “beginner” documentation, appears to be written by experienced Blockly developers for other experienced Blockly developers.  This is the biggest hurdle - understanding enough of how it works to replicate it.

I’m still working on this but it won’t be easy.