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Connecting Scratch 2 to the Thymio-II robot

Scratch2-ThymioII is a helper program that connects the Scratch 2 offline editor to a Thymio-II robot.

  • download and install the latest release
  • connect the Thymio-II by a USB cable or by a Thymio-RF dongle
  • run the Scratch2-ThymioII helper
  • open the Thymio-II sensors.sb2 example with Scratch 2

The new Thymio-II blocks will be in “More Blocks”. Clicking on the backdrop in the example “Thymio-II sensors” will run a simple program to show how the Thymio-II senses its environment. The example “Spirograph arcs” shows how to make simple geometric figures using the basic odometry provided by the helper. The examples “Friendly Thymio-II” and “Simple Explorer” show how a Scratch program can make the robot react to its environment.

On Windows you will need to have installed the Aseba software that came with the robot, since it provides a necessary USB driver.

Instead of running an example, you can load the “ext-scratch-thymioII” extension definition into Scratch 2 using the shift-File menu. The “ext-basic-thymioII” extension can be loaded instead to provide a the low-level interface to the robot. Thymio-II.sprite2 is a simple sprite definition that can be added to any scene.

The helper program is a micro HTTP server that loads a special AESL file “thymio_motion.aesl” that gives the Thymio-II a ‘Scratch personality’, then listens to port 3000 and responds to a simple REST API. See https://github.com/davidjsherman/aseba/tree/master/switches/http for technical details.

While the helper program can manage several robots at the same time, the extension definitions provided here do not take this into account: if more than one Thymio-II is connected, Scratch will talk to one or the other indeterminately.

Le fichier fr-thymioII.po, qui traduit en français les noms des blocs, peut être chargé dans Scratch 2 à partir du menu shift-Monde à gauche.

David James Sherman, Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest, 2014-12-13, 2016-06-28

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Link Scratch 2 and the Thymio-II robot

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