Open Roberta continues to develop – now with added English
Open Roberta is a free cloud-based platform to program the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 using the Scratch like Blockly-library from Google.
Since I first wrote about it, the Open Roberta project has continued to develop and is now up to release 1.4. They’ve given their graphical programming language the name NEPO.
I’ve loved this idea ever since I first saw it, but everything being in German was a limiting factor. Now the blocks are labelled in English an d the English documentation has been vastly improved. There’s still a certain Germanic flavour to the instruction text, but the instructions are clear now and, with the blocks themselves described in English, it is pretty straightforward.
If you are using the EV3 you should be taking a good look at Open Roberta, especially given it’s free and cloud-based.
Thx for this additional article!
Since our first release in 2014 we have added a lot more functionalities e.g:
The main advantages are:
-Create one program for the real robot and for the simulated robot
This means now you can create a NEPO-Program test it with the OpenRoberta-Sim and then download it to the real
EV3-Robot. It makes it very comfortable to create programs.
-Make changes during OR-Sim runs
Now you do not have to switch back to the programming environment if you want to make changes on your NEPO-
Program. You can change the program while OR-Sim is running.
-Update blockly for better performance and zoom function
We integrated a zoom function – if you create huge programs you now be able to zoom out to get a better overview of
the whole program
-Animated EV3 stone
With OR-Sim you now be able to use the EV3 screen and buttons
-Toolbox icons
For better usability on small screens (smartphone etc.) the Toolbox text will be change to icons
-Manual to run Open Roberta Lab on Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
We will provide a user manual which descripes how you can run the whole Open Roberta Lab on a Raspberry 2 / 3
-Open Roberta Starter Kit
To make it as easy as possible we provide a Open Roberta Starter Kit which includes a Wifi dongle and a pre-installed
image of the Open Roberta lejOS firmware
We hope to fit your expectations with the new release. Open Roberta is open source – everybody is invited to join our community https://github.com/OpenRoberta/robertalab