Help me make a script for tutorials

I think there are many kinds of people. Some people like to study the basics first and some like to get their hands dirty right away. It is nearly impossible to make one tutorial for everyone. Nothing stops us to make many of them :slight_smile:

I personally like a tutorial which is simple and short but makes something fancy. When I was studying Unity3D some years ago I went through perhaps only one or two relatively short written tutorials. Then I just picked short pieces of information here and there. I also do not like long video tutorials. But thatā€™s me. A lot of people like them, I am sure.

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I agree that people need to be able to find answers themselves. I think our misunderstanding comes from different ideas about what this tutorial is supposed to be.

For me, it is supposed to be a newbie friendly thing to ā€œhookā€ someone onto game programming. A good starting point. I assume there will eventually be an API explaining the everything without any fluff. All I can say, is such approach worked for me.

Anywayā€¦

I personally prefer text based tutorials for programming. It allows me to take everything at my own pace. Not having to pause the video to read the code is also a big plus for me.

I think videos would work for overview of the various IDEs, but for programming I would prefer text with pictures as needed. We can always make a short video and have an expanded text under it, or even post the transcript.

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My two cents, my personal taste:

I never appreciate a video tutorial. I like to read at mine own speed and fast forward, replay, pause when I need, in the simplest way possibile.

Some or most of the points are already in the wiki or in the forum. Often not so easy addressable or documented, but some of the points are very ambiguous to me and should be well marked. Those are:

  • Screen modes: how many are fully functional? Tiled mode?
  • How to create a new project? A medium project, with 10+ files, that both work in PokittoSim and EmBitz, easy to expand in both, easily maintainable with main lib fixes.
  • Library general picture: thereā€™are a lot of ready made functionality that seems hide in the code: buttons trigger, delays, fixed point math, sound lib, target fps, physics. I donā€™t like to reinvent the wheel and sometimes I feel frustrated to lose lot of time searching something should be there.

Iā€™ll be happy to write a small tutorial on use img2pok,
maybe also to improve it with more assets conversion format (svg, wave).

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On the other side of things, I think there are some topics better served by a video tutorial. The pokitto assembly tutorial was very helpful because I could watch @jonne and realize that I could apply a little more force to the ribbon cable to plug it in. Up to that point I was just using the printed directions and couldnā€™t figure out how to get the ribbon cable properly connected because I wasnā€™t pushing it hard enough. Tutorials that benefit from showing something being done can benefit from a video.

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Will ā€˜14. making & importing soundsā€™ go in depth on the synth side of pokitto?
I want to know how to control each of the oscillators as well as how much they are modulated by the effects and envelope. Iā€™d also like to be able to use pots to control each of those settings.
Actually what is the max number of pots or buttons i could connect?

Theoretically its the number of GPIOā€™s in PEX, although there are various ways of connecting even more.

By my count thatā€™s about 18, which might be enough.
A tutorial on the various ways of connecting more would be helpful.
Iā€™m not definite but iā€™m expecting that iā€™m going to eventually want at least a few more ports.

Iā€™ve started writing a very bare-bones rough draft of the tutorial(s) for programming for the PEX.

To be honest I kind of think the PEX deserves its own series because itā€™s not just as simple as ā€˜write 1/0ā€™ and ā€˜read 1/0ā€™, thereā€™s digital input/output, analogue input/output, pulse width modulation and things I havenā€™t even begun to look at. The PEX really does make the Pokitto just as good for learning electronics as the Arduino is (albeit with a slightly less user-friendly programming pipeline, but itā€™s early days yet).

What does anyone else think?
Should the PEX be a small simple tutorial just discussing how to use the PEX from a programming point of view or should it be a series of tutorials that goes into a bit of basic circuit building as well?

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I think some circuitry also. People are going to need to do both to use it effectively,

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But why? If you go to mbed online, you donā€™t even need to install any programs. The online IDE is at least as good as the Arduino IDE. No board selections, no driver installs. No Com port selections. Assigning a pin is 1 line of code, changing state is 1 line of code.

Iā€™m just interested know why you think so.

Iā€™m using EmBitz rather than mbed online.
Aside from having not got round to setting up an account, I prefer having all my project files stored locally on my hard drive.
If my internet goes down (which it does sometimes) I canā€™t use mbed online, but I would still be able to use EmBitz.

At the moment setting up Pokitto for EmBitz consists of making a copy of the Pokitto Lib and editing the sample files. Ideally at some point Iā€™d like to be able to have it so the Pokitto library is in one place and I can set up the header search directory like I would on a C++ project in Code Blocks or Visual studio (so I can #include <Pokitto.h> at the top), but again itā€™s still early days and I havenā€™t done much digging.

Iā€™ve published the drafts.

Theyā€™re still very early drafts and arenā€™t very organised (and donā€™t have any pictures) but they sort of get the idea across.

Without the basic programming tutorials in place Iā€™m having a bit of a job guessing how much I could expect the person reading them to be able to understand about the programming aspect, so Iā€™ve made sure to comment everything in the code, even the basic bits.

Drafts are here and here.

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This is a really great introduction video of Pico-8.

We should target the same level of integration and easyness in developing for Pokitto!

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Sorry if @VonBednar was already doing this, but I had a bit of time spare so I made this:

https://github.com/Pharap/PokittoGraphics/blob/master/VectorGraphics/PEX.svg

I made it by hand (i.e. in Notepad++) because I couldnā€™t get on with Inkscape.

The values need tweaking a bit and I couldnā€™t get the text to go the other way around but it will suffice for a first draft.

Edit:
Managed to get the text to match up with the original.

Since .svgs canā€™t be uploaded to the forums, hereā€™s a .png rasterised by GIMP:

Edit:
Looks like @VonBednar had already made a better one, but no matter, at least we have a labelled vector diagram for other purposes now.

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Sorry @Pharap, I should have kept you in the loop.

If you need any changes to the vector I made - let me know. I can find some time on the weekend to do tweaks :smiley:

And for everyone else, hereā€™s the pokitto I made for fritzing:

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Itā€™s fine, I literally threw it together in a few hours (I already knew how to make an .svg). Mine isnā€™t quite a fritzing component anyway. It was going to be - the whole reason I randomly decided to make it today was because I wanted to make a Fritzing diagram to use on the tutorial Iā€™m writing.

(I started making a fritzing file (again from scratch because for some reason I get on with writing XML better than learning a new UI) but didnā€™t get very far).

If @jonne hadnā€™t asked me if I had a Twitter account I probably would have only just found out now because normally I donā€™t look at Twitter, I just stick to the forums. Speaking of which you should make a Wiki post about how to use the new Pokitto Fritzing component in Fritzing (i.e. do we have to manually add it, is it already in their database etc).

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Iā€™ve taken the preliminary pictures for the next PEX tutorial which will focus on DigitalIn.

Originally I was planning to make the code just do:

if(button0.read() != 0)
{
    game.display.print("Button pressed");
}
else
{
    game.display.print("Button released");
}

But itā€™s a bit hard to get the text and the button in the camera frame at the same time, so I was thinking about maybe making the screen change colour. I canā€™t get the fillScreen function to work though, Iā€™ve tried feeding it palette indices (0 and 1) and Iā€™ve tried feeding it colours converted to RGB565 but neither seemed to work.
(I suspect Iā€™m missing a step somewhere, like setting the screenmode or something.)

I think this discussion would be illuminated by replacing the words ā€œbeginnersā€ and ā€œpeopleā€ with ā€œchildrenā€ in all of the comments aboveā€“and then ask whether this is realistic to ask of all but the most dedicated children. (I realize Pokitto is also totally fun for adults, but thereā€™s kids in the marketing materials) Kids want to have fun. Iā€™d say let them start with frankenstein code if thatā€™s how they want to start out, and get excited about having made something, and only later fall into tweaking with the motivation of finding out how each bit works, why it works like that or how to make the monsters do something more exciting :slight_smile:

Iā€™ve followed various hardware projects ā€œmaking code fun for kids!ā€ that take the ā€œitā€™s also important to be determined and to not back down just because something looks dullā€ route, which end up having a (often rapidly depleting) user base of 99% adults in the end. :smiley:

The main question is whether the point is to train kids to become professional programmers, or to spark their curiosity and improve their general understanding of what software even is in the first place.

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I am 100% in agreement with you.

Today 4 tutorials added. Follow the links on pokitto.com/programming, then just press ā€œImport to Compilerā€ on the Pokitto Community Team repositories pages and youā€™re good to go!

More stuff coming soon!

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