Is a port of mBlock to the Raspberry Pi 3 feasible?

#1

I’d like to port mBlock to the Raspberry Pi 3. I have a full classroom kit that I can deploy in about an hour complete with robots, arena, computers and monitors. Currently I teach my classes with mBots and the Arduino IDE running on this fleet of RPi3s. I would like to be able to offer the same classes to younger kids and for that I need the graphical programming interface of mBlock.

I’d be happy to put a good deal of effort in to creating this port. What I’m asking for is an assessment of whether the port is even feasible (particularly because the RPi3 is an ARM based machine).

#2

Likely not possible. mBlock is based on the Scratch 2 offline editor which in turn is based on Adobe Air. Adobe does not support Linux which makes a port somewhat challenging. :wink:

If you want to take on a project, there is a discussion thread at Github about possibly porting mBlock to Snap4Arduino. Snap! and Snap4Arduino are written in HTML/CSS/Javascript and are essentially a Scratch workalike although they have first class functions and first class data structures.

#3

A possible solution for you in early 2017 would be running the ARM version of Win 10 on your Raspberry Pi’s.
Not the IoT version the new ARM version. It can run x86 apps in an emulation mode and looks promising.