For my dissertation during my third year at university I created an interface to allow Scratch 1.4 to be used to control the Thymio-II. The goal of the project was to enable people new to programming to be able to create programs which have physical interactions hopefully encouraging them to continue learning to program.
Scratch 1.4 is a programming environment using blocks to allow people to program without syntax or even needing to remember the specific commands. The Thymio-II is a small robot with with 2 intendant wheels, 7 distance sensors, 2 ground sensor, a mic and a 3 axis accelerometer. The Thymio is usually programmed using a language specifically built for it, the code is then stored on the Thymio and executed. Unfortunately the Thymio has a small capacity of program storage.
The Thymio robot with a Raspberry Pi and a battery allowing it to work without being tethered to a computer.
The interface is written in Python 2.7.9 and uses the scratchpy module to communicate with Scratch 1.4. Communicating with the Thymio made use of D-Bus which is a Linux protocol and so the interface only works on Linux operating systems. So far the interface has been tested on Rasbpian and on Ubuntu.
The dissertation can be seen here
Some videos of the interface in action can be seen here
The code can be found here