Hi all
I have to say that this thread has been very, very interesting.
Whilst I still have copies of V3 and V4 I can't really remember them other than I found Flowcode and the Development Board (of the time) extremely helpful. I mainly used it to "play" with (despite Professional Licences for all my versions). Flowcode V5 really changed things for me. That was, thanks to learning on previous versions, the one I started to use. For me, V5 and the components that came with it really opened up the potential.
I am not a programmer. In early 80's I did do machine code for Z80, chips not Sir Clive's offspring (Tandy TRS-80 but that's another story. Still have my working TRS-80 Lev-II 16K......) but that was through necessity to make a machine interact. I was not too terrible with the numerous BASIC languages and I did find GW-BASIC very useful and easy to use. However since late 80's-ish I had little interest in working with "PC's" other than they were just another tool to use for the job in hand, and of course to play DOOM on
A feature of V5 I really loved was the Web Server component in which I could very easily create a page with zero knowledge of what was going on behind the scenes. I needed to measure numerous banks of sensors, I think around 160 per bank, and have a database collate and present the information. Using V5 I created arrays to populate with the sensor values and then displayed them as a "page". Documentation said you could only display four variables on the web page but, I add I can't remember exactly how, by using arrays I could display a 4 x 40 array. This page was displayed and my database program of choice, FileMaker, could read the page and store it in a field. It then parsed the field and created records accordingly. This worked a treat
I bought V6, but not straight away. When I did upgrade I found it very, very different to what went before. Although the available components, a huge feature of Flowcode was increasing, my biggest problem was that if using the web server I had to enter my own HTML (not so much so in V5). Remember I'm not a programmer so to use was a steep learning curve. Perhaps not to others but for me it was. I did create a few projects using V6 and I think it was the first version to offer an ESP8266 component.
I had issues using the ESP as examples wouldn't work. I did find it quite fun looking through the generated "C" and kind of figuring things out, to a very limited extent, but had no clue as to how to resolve. The problem was that Espresif changed their firmware and also the reply FC was expecting..... One of the VC's, Kersing, very kindly helped by modifying the component, which was way outwith my capabilities. Still not a programmer but "C" isn't so strange any more. Viewing "C" is a valuable faultfinding tool.
I upgraded to V7 despite knowing it would be months before I could connect to any hardware, and I really liked it. My confidence was increasing and things worked (with support from the forum of course). Using it I created a few LoRa projects and started to dabble with motors.
V8 came along and I'm now playing with Steppers and Servo's and I made a "mesh" LoRa despite only having one singular channel for all to communicate over. It was fun and I was learning. That to me is one of Flowcode's greatest strengths. Once you figure out how to use it, things become quite intuitive and if stuck the forum helps you to figure it out. I keep versions of V5 onwards on my PC, just in case I need to work on a previous project
The whole team at Matrix should be really proud of their entire range as without it, many would never even try to use microcontrollers let alone be as creative as they are.
Regards