Abstract
This article proposes the BIPES, a <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B</b> lock based <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">I</b> ntegrated <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">P</b> latform for <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">E</b> mbedded <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">S</b> ystems, including its architecture, design and validation results. BIPES is an open source software and service that is freely available through the website <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">http://www.bipes.net.br</uri> and has been conceived from our experience of several years developing embedded systems and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and teaching. It allows anyone to quickly and reliably design, program, build, deploy and monitor embedded systems, IoT devices and applications using blocks or Python based programming. It is fully based on web environment, so absolutely no software installation is needed on the client developer machine. In this way, a tablet, a netbook, a Chromebook or any other device can be used to program and test several types of devices. Mainly, it relies on MicroPython or CircuitPython, WebREPL, WebSockets, Web Serial API, HTML, JavaScript and Google Blockly to allow no-code programming (blocks) to be translated into Python code and then deployed to the target board. Moreover, it does not require server side processing, so it can be deployed as a Progressive Web Application (PWA), allowing it to be used even when the computer is offline. It is compatible with several low cost boards such as: mBed, BBC micro:bit, ESP8266, ESP32 and Raspberry Pi using only a web browser and without the need to install any software on the device where the user develops the programming.
Highlights
P ROGRAMMING Without Code: The Rise of No-Code Software Development, a recent article by Rina Diane Callabar [6] on IEEE Spectrum Tech Talk section remembers how important software is and how several tools are helping more people to program without code
The main contribution of this paper is to introduce the design, architecture, implementations, and current status of BIPES development, and making it fully available to other groups and researchers as an open source tool. It relies on MicroPython, CircuitPython or Python running on target boards, such as ESP32, ESP8266, Raspberry Pi or even a standard x86 computers
At this point we discuss in more detail the UIFlow and Microsoft MakeCode projects that are the ones mostly related to BIPES
Summary
P ROGRAMMING Without Code: The Rise of No-Code Software Development, a recent article by Rina Diane Callabar [6] on IEEE Spectrum Tech Talk section remembers how important software is and how several tools are helping more people to program without code. Such situations motivated us to develop a new approach named above as BIPES, which, by design, consists of a fully web-based tool that does not require any software installation, nor even add-ons or plugins for the web browser Another project goal is to allow block based programming with multiple target boards / modules. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce the design, architecture, implementations, and current status of BIPES development, and making it fully available to other groups and researchers as an open source tool It relies on MicroPython, CircuitPython or Python running on target boards, such as ESP32, ESP8266, Raspberry Pi or even a standard x86 computers.
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