Compatibility of Zumo 32U4 and MiniBloq?

Hi,

I’m helping teach a robotics class to 8-12 year olds using borrowed Lego MindStorm robots. The class has been excellent and we’ve been asked to repeat it with more students but we don’t have long term access to the Lego robots. We also have a very limited budget. We like the features/ruggedness/quality of the Zumo 32U4 robot and the MiniBloq programming environment; however, we can’t tell for sure if they are compatible. Will they work together?

We’ve looked at other graphical programming environments (BlocklyDuino, MakeBlock, SparkiDuino, …) and robots but without hands on experience with them we can’t determine which would be most suitable for this age group. MiniBloq looks very capable and well documented. Other suggestions?

Thanks so much for the help.

Paul

Hello, Paul.

Anibit customized BlockyDuino for use with our 3pi robot, but I do not know what would be required to make it work with a Zumo. I had not heard of MiniBloq before, but it looks like it supports the Arduino Leonardo (which uses the same ATmega32U4 microcontroller as our Zumo robot). You might look more into whether is supports external libraries like those for our Zumo, since using the functionality in those libraries makes the Zumo much easier to work with.

-Nathan