Flowcode - New in V11

Graphical Display Design Tools

New for version 11 is a full library of components for driving touch screen graphical displays: display drivers for the most popular touch screens, graphics widgets, graph widgets, touch screen components, WYSIWYG graphical display designer and menu control subroutines. These allow you to design touch screen graphical displays based on any 8, 16, or 32 bit microcontroller.

V11 graphical display tools

Web mirroring

Web Mirror

The Web Mirror features allows you to mirror the functionality of you touch screen system on any browser anywhere in the world. This is only available on the E-blocks 3 hardware for now. The great benefit is that you can use your mobile phone to control your electronic projects.

No coding is needed. It's just a couple of settings on the Graphical display component. Flowcode takes care of all the details.

New Project Wizard and Auto-detect

Getting started is so hard. So many options, choices, settings in our beautiful complex world. The new project wizard provides a menu system that makes this easier for all users showing options and guiding users through choices.

If you have E-blocks 3 hardware then it is even easier: Flowcode sees what upstream and downstream boards you have connected and sets up the program for you.

New project wizard

Serial debugging targets

Serial Debugging on Hardware

Serial debugging allows you to pause your program as it runs in hardware and see the status of variables in your project. You can set breakpoints in your code and change the values of variables while program execution is paused.

Serial debugging was only available on Matrix hardware in V10. In V11, Serial debugging now works on third party hardware that has a serial COM port available via USB. This includes many Arduino, ESP32 and PIC boards.

E-Blocks 3 and Auto-id

The goal is simple: create the best environment for developing electronic projects. Its hard to separate the hardware from the software sometimes. The combination of Flowcode and E-Blocks 3 provides an amazing development platform for both educators and industrial engineers.

Each E-blocks downstream board has a small microcontroller on it. These communicate to the upstream board to inform Flowcode what hardware is connected. This allows Flowcode to put the appropriate components on the 2D panel with all the right settings, making project setup much easier!

E-Blocks 3 and auto-id

New Microcontrollers

New microcontrollers

The world does not stand still. Manufacturers are constantly adding new microcontrollers with more features, smaller silicon areas, faster clock rates and so on.

We constantly add new microcontrollers to the chip lists. A lot of work has been done recently to add the Microchip PIC8 Q range

Flowcode is now compatible with 772 8-bit PIC microcontrollers.

2d Panel Updates

The 2D panel has been upgraded so that it is now possible to zoom in and out on all component views.

A new rich text components adds formatted text to components and panels, and all panel objects now can be anchored to the panel sides or even set to display completely in the panel (e.g. for showing charts in a separate window).

Flowcode's 2d Panel

New coding features

New Coding Features

A variety of new features have been added to make coding in Flowcode v11 even simpler than before.

Direct string comparisons can now be made in decision icons, the loop command has a "loop forever" option and several new operators (e.g. increment/decrement and assignment) have been added to make Flowcode calculations more representative of C code.

Other improvements include:

Dynamic menus and web-based windows added
Anchors and 'fit component' options for panel objects
Group icon contents can be viewed without needing to ungroup
User is now warned when openign a project that is already open
Flowcode now has separate icons for Embedded, Web Developer and PC Developer project files
Macros can now be shown as a different graphical/text view direct from the macro tab
Library version log file shows which versions of library files are used in compiled project
Colour options available on macro descriptions
Position anchors for components
New richtext primitive for component panels
View group icon contents
Access variables in simulated component code
Direct access to variable manager
Warn when opening a project that is already open
New file extensions for Flowcode project types
Change macro view types on the fly
Advanced component profiling and debugging
Clear All Breakpoints no longer ignores the loop command
Digital i/o panel now updated correctly when PORT property change iterates through subcomponents
Digital i/o panel now updated correctly when pane is first opened
Caption bar now shows project type
Dropping icons onto overlapped macro views correctly drops onto topmost window
Non-flowchart macros can now be exported as image
New state diagram macro menu item added
Web Developer projects do not show state diagram icons
List Occurrences check is now case-insensitive
Improvements to dark colour scheme
Added ability to show and hide component macros via API command
Fixed read-only nature of component properties
Fixed the sim control speed slider
Fixed 'corrupt macro' error message text that got lost during an exception
Mouse events now triggered at the dead area at the top of Project Explorer
Component major/minor versions now 0-999 (was 0-100)
Hidden option to show '!=' as '<>'
Fixed MatrixLight/MatrixDark inbuilt colour schemes for charts
2d panels now hide toolbar when simulating
FCDChange event is fired when chip stays the same but clock speed changes
Fixed longstanding bug with broadcast message parameter corruption
Moved components on 2d panel now redraw their vacated areas too
Subcomponents of a group now get unique names when copying/pasting
Added GetActual2dPosition/GetActual2dPosition API commands
Context menu for component panels stops renames, deletion, etc, when simulating
Wndhost comps (button, combobox and textbox) now update when resized on the panel
Text primitives now redraw their actual text area too
Improved visual styling for dark mode, and fixed styling issues with combo boxes, etc.
Removed redundant colour and code-customisation information from saved project files
Fixed SIGNED/UNSIGNED casting
Fixed simulation of Decision tail icon
Search now finds ports/pins
Added logical AND, OR and NOT (&&, ||, !) to maths functions list
Improved tooltip help for maths and string functions
Function lists now categorised
Call stack view width can be altered using mouse wheel in Simulation Debugger window
Component panel zoom level now shown on status bar
Improved component toolbar display on non-100% DPI systems
New variables are given default initialisers
Macro parameters can have default values for parameters
Macro tabs have 'close' and 'close other' menu item
Added CallMacro in-built functions
Added in-built functions to manipulate text-based property lists
Fixed flicker in IOC chip view in interrupt prpoperties dialog
Components and macros now available to add to expressions in icon dialogs
List properties can now be auto-sorted
Flowcode now uses a 'ping' to ensure web-based dialogs retain current information

New in Flowcode v11