XOD 0.29.0: New Tutorial

Hi there! I’m glad to announce the new release of the XOD visual programming language. This time our team laser-focused on docs rather than on features, and now XOD carries a brand new built-in tutorial. It is also available in the web version for quick exploration.

The previous version was created along with the first versions of IDE, and it is lacking an explanation of some concepts that we introduced recently. The new version fixes it. It is also structured better and split into four parts:

1. Welcome — XOD basics which you can try without any hardware by using the simulation mode
2. Hardware — Working with popular hardware
3. Patterns — Common XOD tasks and idioms
4. Creating patches — Learn how to develop own nodes

Hope you enjoy it.

What else

There’s an annoying problem reported many times in the community. A conflict appears when one tries to control a single physical device (such as servo or LCD) from multiple nodes at different moments. If hardware nodes’ update pulses are not managed very carefully, the hardware can act sporadically reacting to orders from multiple nodes at the same time.

XOD is young, and even its authors don’t know all possibilities and tricks. We thought a new concept is necessary to deal with the problem, but fortunately, we’ve found a pattern which likely solves the problem and does not require any new features. Meet Mutex!

Mutexes (stands for “mutually exclusive”) available as a new library xod/mutex which allows a node to lock a resource taking exclusive control over it until the lock would be explicitly released or revoked. A comprehensive article on this topic is yet to be written, but you can already get the idea from a chapter of the tutorial talking about the sequential movement of a servo.

The servo rotates slowly step after step ignoring new orders until the last step is complete

As usual, the release includes many other small improvements and enhancements. 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.