Evening. Apologies to those who code, but here is a daft simplistic start to using Rockpool if you haven’t ever coded anything before. We love playing with Flotilla, but my son can use Scratch and I can… well, let’s say that Fortran is a little dated.
We had a good poke around Rockpool and decided to document what we found, using non-coder language and possibly a little too much waffle. If it’s helpful, great. If you can already figure it out for yourself, also great. Please smile and wave as you pass by!
So… onto the “hotness meter”, as we call it. We wanted to make the Rainbow lights change colour if you held the Barometer. First step was to fire up Rockpool as described in the Flotilla leaflet that came with it. On the left we saw “INPUT” and figured that this was the Thing That Looks For Information. On the right we saw “OUTPUT” and figured this was the Thing That Did Things. The only trouble we had was working out how to make the input affect the output.
We chose Temperature as our INPUT and then OUTPUT we set to a blue LED. The blue lights came on the Rainbow and the Temperature on our screen showed 469 (which is 23.8c, if you’re interested). The temperature is measured out of 1000, so we know it’s over 40% but under 50% of full capacity. We needed to set the Temperature to 500 (not too far off, easily warmed by a hand), and make it change to a different colour LED.
We clicked on an empty CONVERTER (gosh, it looks like I’m shouting, sorry) and made it say “less than”. This opened a little box under temperature where we could choose our 50%.
So… I’d tell you how we made it go red when the temperature was greater than 50% but I’m sure that even if you’re not a coder you have logic skills and can have a go yourself.