XIAO Boards Now Fully Support MicroBlocks Programming

Seeed Studio’s XIAO series of development boards features a tiny (21 x 17.8mm) footprint, along with a wide range of capabilities and processing units, making them ideal for small embedded projects. While they can be programmed in the familiar-to-many Arduino IDE, if you’re entirely new to the world of microcontrollers and physical computing, this could represent a steep learning curve.

As an alternative, Seeed recently announced full support for the MicroBlocks visual programming language! MicroBlocks describes itself as “a free, Scratch-like blocks programming language for learning physical computing with educational microcontroller boards.” What's really neat about MicroBlocks is that, while it’s not the only block-based microcontroller language, it supports both live programming and autonomous operation. So code changes run on your board immediately, and when you unplug it, the device still runs. You can even plug it into another computer to allow someone else to explore your code!

MicroBlocks runs on boards like the BBC micro:bit and Adafruit Circuit Playground Express, and now it’s available on the entire XIAO family. So if you have one of these thumb-sized boards, all you need to do to get started is: connect it to your computer, open MicroBlocks in a Chrome or Edge browser, install MicroBlocks firmware, and get coding. Or you can plug in someone else’s programmed board to see how their code works!

More info is available on the MicroBlocks Wiki and Seeed Studio’s page.