In summer 2021 I moved the Visual Coding prototype into the Peakboard Designer. The feature got the name Building Blocks and a place inside the Script Editor, as a second mode next to the Lua text editor. The move brought type safety, two faster ways to edit and the first block families.
The screenshot below shows the Script Editor with Block Mode switched on. The events and controls sit on the left, the blocks in the middle, the palette on the right and the generated Lua underneath.
Inside the Designer the blocks had to behave like a real feature, not a demo. The biggest part of that was type safety. Every value in a block carries a type. Lua itself does not check types at runtime, so the editor does it. A block that returns the wrong type does not connect. The connector shows a red mark and a tooltip with the accepted types. The next screenshot shows this on a create table block.
Important: the types exist only inside the editor. They stop you from connecting blocks that fail once the script runs.
Two features from autumn 2021 made editing faster. QuickAdd inserts the next block directly into the flow you are in, without a trip back to the palette. QuickWrap takes a block you have placed and wraps it inside a new one. Turning a statement into the body of an if block is then one action instead of several. Both are still the block editor features I use the most.
In January 2022 the trash can got undo and variables got a safe rename across the whole script. The palette got its first block families: SQL, MQTT, S7, Edge devices, Hub lists and mail.
That’s it.
If you have questions feel free to contact me.
Links:
Peakboard Designer →
Building blocks documentation →
Script editor documentation →