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Function Block Friday: Queue Buffers This week, we’re diving into Buffers as Function Blocks. Buffers are essential elements of many robust systems for ensuring actions and data in asynchronous environments are dealt with. Though simple in concept buffers can be deceptively difficult to code robustly and efficiently, especially for memory-constrained applications. Lucid offers a range of buffer types including First-In-First-Out (FIFO), and Last-In-First-Out (LIFO). Queuing buffers are conventionally modelled as push and pop functions, where push adds an element to…

It’s FUNCTION BLOCK FRIDAY! – This week we are looking at MODBUS. One of the most persistent machine-to-machine communications protocols owing to its simplicity and flexibility that is experiencing a renaissance in applications such as heat pumps and solar PV Inverters and remains common in smart buildings, robotics and industrial automation. MODBUS is a standard for machines to exchange simple data formats and signal command and control. It is simple and cheap to provide on any MCU-based systems and is…

This week we will be showing off Finite State Machines (FSMs) and how easy and functional they are to build in lucid. Why use a state machine? A state machine is a model representing a system that can be in only one state at a time, transitioning between a finite set of states based on inputs or events. When software is built without clearly modelling system states things generally don’t go well. Visual representation of state and transitions between them…

This week, we’re diving into function block Math operations. IoT sensors, controllers or cloud data processing often needs to do some numerical work to make them smart. Lucid makes these operations incredibly straightforward. The most general maths function block allows algebraic expressions to be entered, or you can choose from individual operator function blocks, but let’s start with some simple algebra! Single input single output or multivariate blocks are available, but here we are using a single input value doing…

It’s week 3 of FBF and we’re looking at User Interfaces for devices. Graphical UIs in Lucid are built from inxware’s widget library that perform well-known user interactions such as displaying and acquiring text or numerical data from users. More advanced widgets include images, shaped objects, video, graphs, animation and even sound. To get started the Hello World application below shows a simple interactive text box app in the Lucid IDE and inxware enabled device simulation in the window below.…