Use Scratch to Easily Program Household Appliances | Hacker News Reader

Use Scratch to Easily Program Household Appliances

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25 pointsshawndumas8 comments

Looking at the example screenshot makes me realize that the hard part of programming is not the syntax, the hard part is breaking a "simple" task down into steps. Even with a GUI, loops and if/then are not immediately intuitive and will require training, and by the time you've taught someone to think like a programmer, the syntax won't matter anymore.

(One counter-example is AppleScript. That lets you perform the action, and then it makes the script for you. You can then tweak and see what happens, which lets you experiment and learn. Tweaking is easier than starting from nothing.)

The hard part is coping with the ramifications of turing completeness. Doesn't look like they want that far here.

The hard part doing this is not the programming side, it's the physical interface side, and doing it in a useful and cost effective manner.

I'd love to have whole house lighting control, but at $20/node, it's not going to happen. I'd love to have some sort of datalogging and computer control of my 6 thermostats and the wood stove. My research was showing something like $100/node for the thermostats, and less than that for the thermocouples for the stove, but then I'd need a datalogger for them. I'd love to have killawatt meters in all my sockets, with wireless reporting. Etc Etc Etc.

Their system is a usb->xbee, and then xbee->arduino on the other end. That's like $100 of control systems, and you still don't actually have interfaces to anything, you have a low power board that needs a driver to even drive a reasonable relay. (but, there are easy driver circuits for that, even $20 pigtails with embedded relays)

Once you get to doing real tasks, I think that this is very definitely true.

However, from my experience TAing intro programming classes (2 of them, both targeted at non-CS majors) the syntax is still a huge roadblock for a lot of people when they're learning to program. When they're learning, a lot of people spend so much time worrying about the syntax ("how do I write it?") that they don't get to the much more important "how do I solve the problem?" without a lot of prompting.

Scratch is starting to take off. It is a pretty powerful paradigm not just because of its visual nature, but also because of the ease with witch you can "play" with your code, and see, in real time, the results. Here is an example used for design: http://designblocks.net/ .

Taking the fear out of programming, making it tinkerable, is hugely valuable. Not to mention the emphasis on creation and story telling that it is designed for. Breaking it out into the real world is a wonderful way to make the computer more than just software.

Scratch seems to be a good starting place for programming. I started my 6yr old on it over christmas, and he was making som progress making the onscreen stuff do what he wanted. It was great to see the light go on that he could make the computer do what he wanted it to do.

(now, to get his ui better than click, and hit the keys z x c v in order)

I hadn't actually looked at Scratch in detail before...it reminds me strongly of iShell (multimedia authoring platform), which grew out of some Apple tech.

A spreadsheet is easier to use than Scratch...

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