I am a newbee I have three patches that work fine separately. How do I call one then the other in the main. I do not understand how XOD flow control works. I tried to use the “Done” and input-pulse function to trigger the next node. Is there a way of calling a node with an if statement? Can anyone please suggest a lesson?
Thank you
If I do not connect the loop pin the patch runs until the motor sees the limit. If I put in a tweak-pulse function to the UPD pin it misses the limit
gweimer/traffic-light-advanced — XOD picks up where the standard simple traffic light tutorial ends and includes building your own nodes to be included in other patches as well as flow control & branching. To load the library in XOD, use File > Add Library, then search for “traffic”. Once added, scroll down in Project Browser window (upper-left pain of XOD) to find gweimer/traffic-light-advanced.
Probably your first problem is that patches that “work fine separately” do not have input/output pins. These will pretty much be required to include your node inside another patch to either provide data input or just trigger when the node should fire.
As a matter of terminology, there is no ‘loop’ pin. There is an UPD pin, which defaults to ‘loop’. If you add a tweak node to the pin, the port is only checked when you pulse the tweak node. If you don’t pulse the UPD pin, then the port is never checked, so the if-else-COND pin never changes.
To pulse the tweak node, you need to be in debug mode, select the tweak node, then click the pulse button in the inspector window (lower-left pain of XOD window)
Thank you!!! I will go through the tutorial . I am grateful. I am hopping XQD is the answer to our software switch from LabView.
Are you a XOD person? We like your program I hope it will be our default program. Our C++ programmer is retiring!!!
Depends what you mean by “XOD person”. I had nothing to do with its development; that is done by Russian folks, who have unfortunately been affected by sanctions after the Ukraine invasion & there have been no updates since. I stumbled onto XOD while teaching a robotics course to students who could not do any coding. Since then, I have enjoyed helping folks with basic programming issues on this forum.
Although XOD is great for making simple programs easy to create for people who don’t know how to code, you will still need programmer-like thought processes to create more complex code, especially if you want to interface with hardware that doesn’t have existing XOD nodes either built-in or in the libraries provided by other users.
If you are running a business with multiple employees that requires coding to continue to exist, I would NOT recommend using XOD, especially since there has been no development work on it for quite a while now. If your company depends on the code you will be writing, you should really have someone who understands how to code. XOD written by non-programmers might be appropriate if this code is just a small part of your product that just does a few simple things & doesn’t have to be efficient. If you want to interface with hardware that needs more than simple digital on/off or analog read & PWM output and there is no interface for that hardware already in XOD, then programming will be needed to create your own nodes to use that hardware.
XOD can certainly be used to create very complex programs, and it abstracts out a lot of the picky details to let you focus on what you want done, but it does not remove the need to be able to think logically and go through a problem step-by-step, breaking down complex tasks into smaller, simpler ones and linking it all together. My students who couldn’t code still struggled to do anything much more complex than turning LEDs on & off in XOD and required a lot of spoon-feeding to get them through. If you struggle with algebra & coding, XOD might be the bridge that allows you to do simple things on your own, but it is not going to magically make you a master programmer. If you never learned coding, but are good at algebra, XOD might be the bridge that helps you become a good programmer. Sure, everyone can learn how to code (or sing, or paint, or…), but not everyone is going to be good at it. Just because you are “not good at it” and can’t make a living doing it, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy doing it, but you will enjoy it a lot more if you have reasonable expectations for yourself.
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Thanks for the reply, I myself have some C++ mostly to give subroutines (machine lang., to C) to real coders I am a hardware person at hart but have access to hard core coding people that code in all the form (C++, java, aciveVos, Python.) I was investigating Visuino but it has a way to go in development and I found inbedding C into it was cumbersome. I myself was coding LabView before NI got to big and dropped my partnership status after 20yrs.
Do you know of any other visual programing Languages that are similar to XOD,visuino? I have tried ??block and some of the others that pop up in searches
Thanks again for the help. I am grateful!!!
Oh I do have a company developing a submersible glider.
Sorry for being a pest have you any experience or ideas about Flowcode?
I don’t have experience with anything besides Arduino IDE & XOD.
Have you tried ArduBlock? I believe it’s designed for beginners.
Comparing Flowcode and XOD, Flowcode is a high-cost software, but XOD — in my opinion — operates with a more original programming paradigm.
I did try ArduBlock last year Like Visuino it is limited on the boards. (Arduino) I can program. I have corresponded with Boian Mitov and Ron Cutts extensively last year and some recently to see if they were still up and running. Visuino was hard to use they do not have the explanation of the pins like XOD so I was doing a lot of trial and error.
It seems XOD has (and if I learn how) more boards that I can program PI4? I really want to program the beagle bone blue!!! Again I am a rudimentary C++ programmer.
I will look at ArduBlock again. I am really leaning tword XOD but if they can fold at any time I can’t base our new glider on it.
We are still looking. Thanks very much for your help!!!
Hi - we have been using XOD to allow non-programmers (i.e. biologists) to build scientific instrumentation (at the University of Cambridge). I agree with everything that gweimer wrote - the current uncertainty around the future of XOD makes it a difficult choice for any commercial work, but it is a uniquely intuitive package to use compared to Labview/Visuino,Flowcode, with consistent visual metaphors and focus on simple microcontroller-hardware interfacing - still very useful - and free. I’ll attach one of our working examples. It would be great to see the development effort pick up again.
If it is of any help, we have some training material at https://www.biomaker.org
Matt Wayland is also based in Cambridge, frequents this forum, and is a prolific producer of XOD libraries, converted from Arduino libraries for expanded hardware support. Matt and I are keen to develop expanded support for ESP32 and new touchscreen displays (for general purpose I/O).
Jim Haseloff
XOD_AirflowReactor.pdf (3.2 MB)