After being presented for two years in many conferences and schools, the Sirius tutorial based on the Mindstorms Robot case-study has been made publicly available on the Sirius wiki.
This tutorial explains how to use Eclipse Sirius to create a graphical editor for piloting a Mindstorms Robot. The graphical editor allows to describe a sequence of instructions (going forward, rotating, grabing or releasing an object).
The Mindstorms modeling tool created with Sirius
This is a simplified version of a Mindstorms modeling tool initially created by Mélanie Bats and Axel Richard in 2016 for Obeo’s 10th anniversary. This tool spiced many of our events up with robots fighting parties: two players could graphically design the best sequence of instructions for their Mindstorms robot to grab the maximum of objects on a playground.
Two robots fighting at EclipseCon Europe 2016 in Ludwigsburg
Fight is gonna start at Models 2016 in Saint-Malo
With Julien Dupont, we decided to reuse and simplify this modeling tool for the Sirius tutorials that we regularly present during conferences (EclipseCon, SiriusCon, SiriusDay, Models, etc) and teach in software engineering schools.
Mindstorms tutorial at Models 2016 in Saint-Malo
Mindstorms tutorial at SiriusCon 2017 in Paris
The result is a public tutorial available here: https://wiki.eclipse.org/Sirius/Tutorials/Mindstorms
It is composed of four main steps that teach the basics of EMF and Sirius:
- The definition of the domain model
- The creation of a diagram that automatically draws the sequence of instructions
- The creation of edition and navigation tools
- The customization of custom properties views
Each step is provided with:
- the complete demonstration video
- the script listing all the steps
- the required resources (icons, sample, source code, …)
- the solution (Sirius projects)
Watch the introduction video that explains the tutorial:
Your feedback is welcome :-)
If you are an academic teaching Model-Driven Engineering, you can contact us if you are interested in reusing this tutorial for your own courses.
We can also provide you the complete modeling tool which includes the Acceleo generator that produces the Java code executed by the Mindstorms Robot.