Planet Arduino

If you’ve ever been curious if there’s a way to program microcontrollers without actually writing software, you might be interested in FlowCode. It isn’t a free product, but there is a free demo available. [Web learning] did a demo of programming a Nucleo board using the system. You can check it out below.

The product looks slick and it supports a dizzying number of processors ranging from AVR (yes, it will do Arduino), PIC, and ARM targets. However, the pricing can add up if you actually want to target all of those processors as you wind up paying for the CPU as well as components. For example, the non-commercial starter pack costs about $75 and supports a few popular processors and components like LEDs, PWM, rotary encoders, and so on.

Price aside, we have serious concerns about building applications with GUIs. It sounds seductive and for simple projects, it is easy and intuitive. However, complex problems get messy quickly when you have flowcharts. This is the same reason complex logic designs moved away from schematics — another form of graphical representation — and went to Verilog and VHDL.

Still, looking at how this is done might give you some ideas and it might be just the ticket for the right application. It isn’t the only graphical game in town, of course. There’s ArduBlock, for example. Another one we’ve looked at is MiniBloq. You can even use Scratch on the Arduino or Raspberry Pi.