XOD 0.24.0: Use Existing Arduino Libraries with Ease
The XOD visual programming IDE continues to evolve. The primary purpose for the latest release is simplifying interaction with the already established Arduino ecosystem.
Not a secret, Arduino has attracted a vast amount of developers who created thousands of libraries to support virtually any extension module, sensor, or actuator on the planet.
Besides that XOD is based on the Arduino runtime, it is not the same: you can’t install a library made for Arduino and expect a few new nodes in XOD IDE. Some intermediate code have along with small patches have to be created. That is called a wrapper. We tried to make the process of wrapping as smooth as possible.
A new #pragma XOD require
directive for C++ code allows to tightly bind XOD library with a corresponding Arduino library published on GitHub so that any xoder who installs the XOD library gets the C++ dependencies automatically.
Read a new guide article in the documentation about making a new wrapper over existing Arduino library to support a new piece of hardware.
RFID/NFC library
While making the wrapping system, XOD developers needed to test it on something. That’s how a new xod-dev/pn532-nfc
library was born. Now you can scan, read, and write RFID/NFC tags with modules based on the popular PN532 chip.
Here’s how it feels in XOD:
Date and time
The standard library now includes xod/datetime
. It allows treating timestamps as full-fledged values line numbers or strings.
Nodes related to RTC (Real Time Clock) modules reading and writing were moved from xod/common-hardware
to a dedicated new library xod-dev/ds-rtc
. And the new nodes now use the new datetime
type.
Expect a new guide article about working with RTC modules very soon.
Performance improvements
XOD developers found a transpilation-stage performance sink and fixed it. This affects complex projects with dozens or hundreds of nodes and makes them transpile 10× to 100× faster 🚀
Also, we moved to a newer NodeJS v10 which should deliver yet another bit of performance.
And the last, but not least: a new version of updater brings block updates which will make updates from 0.24.0 to later versions much faster.
There are many other small improvements. Read the full list on GitHub.
Get the new version of XOD from the downloads page or try it directly in your browser. If you have XOD installed already, accept the upgrade offer when IDE starts.
Go, wrap something!