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.…
Week 2 of the Function Block Friday posts is upon us and this week we are featuring ordinary file read and write blocks. Every programmer will be familiar with how files are accessed programmatically and Lucid does nothing unusual in this respect other than condense many lines of code into a single simple function block. Let’s start with reading data from a file with the simple “File Read Block”. This function block allows you to read data from any file…
Introducing 🎉 FUNCTION BLOCK FRIDAY 🎉 To kick off this series on Lucid’s library of function blocks we’re introducing the IoT industry’s favourite device connectivity protocol – MQTT! If you don’t know MQTT, it’s a lightweight publish/subscribe messaging protocol used widely in devices and server messaging. Lucid lets you configure and run secure MQTT connections to your favourite MQTT broker service in just a few seconds and NO CODE. For secure connections, you may need a security certificate from your…