Mods are one of the most awesome things that Minecraft offers. They add new gameplay, functionality and cool stuff. Today, we’re showcasing something that goes beyond almost everything you’ve seen already. This mod allows you to control the world around you from within Minecraft. Pinnoccio Craft bridges the gap between Minecraft, and Pinoccio-a programmable platform for working with electronics.
It’s well known now that Microsoft purchased Mojang because they are betting on using Minecraft on teaching a whole new generation how to code. Today we are lucky to have connected with a pioneer in this industry who is bridging the gap for tomorrow’s engineers. Gavin @gdinubilo is 18 years old and on his 3rd year in college for web development. He does a lot of programming while he interns at Pinoccio, which makes the microcontroller boards. Gavin tells us “this project was more of an experiment to see if it was possible to communicate to the board using Minecraft.”
The Pinoccio board is a small microcontroller board, that right out of the box is connected to the internet, and there’s an API setup so that you can communicate to the board, with any language out there.
It’s the first of it’s kind where you can communicate to the real world from a virtual one.”
The mod is pretty powerful, even though it’s super simple, Only a couple of different blocks are added, there’s an LED block, which when powered will change the color of the on-board LED depending on what color wool you have on top of the LED block. Another thing about Pinoccio is that they have what’s called scoutscript, which has many different commands, so I setup what’s called a scoutscript block, which will allow you to send scoutscript commands to your Pinoccio.
Essentially what it does is give people a different medium to interact with the board.”
You can also run any scoutscript command, from “/run ” in minecraft for example “/run Led.red” and that will change the led on the board to red.
Now the coolest thing is reading data from the board, currently you can only read digital pins, and there’s a command for it, “/read d2” for example would read the 2nd digital pin, but it will only run once. To run it multiple times, you need to setup a command block to a clock, and then a repeater to read the output from the command block.
Ultimately the point of it is to allow people to “program” the Pinoccio microcontroller board from inside Minecraft, when I say program, I actually mean send commands. So you could change the onboard LED color, or read if a digital pin is on or off, or tell a digital pin to be on or off.
So for like practical uses, (one in video is a sort of melon farm reader), when the melon is finished growing it’ll change the LED on the Pinoccio from Red to Green, and when you destroy it, the LED will go back to Red. Or another one that is like a door switch, so when you press a button on the board, it will open a door in the game.
It’s a pretty powerful mod, and it’s the first of it’s kind where you can communicate to the real world from a virtual one, which is truly amazing. Currently Gavin is working on a RC car hack, where you use the mod to control the car.
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