Naming conventions for Thymio
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When working collaboratively on a large project spanning several medias such as Wiki and github-maintained LaTeX documents, it is important to agree on how things are named. This page lists the naming conventions related to Thymio:
- The "II" number after the Thymio should be omitted whenever it is obvious which version we speak about.
- The Thymio II infrared sensors are in reality "reflected intensity sensors", and this intensity is a non-linear (but mostly monotonic) function of the distance and the colour of the surface and its local geometry. Therefore there is a need for a shorter term, and both proximity and distance sensors have been used. The correct usage depends on the context, when speaking about these sensors in general they should be called:
- (horizontal) proximity sensors for horizontal ones
- ground (proximity) sensors for bottom ones
- As on Thymio buttons are capacitive, they cannot be physically pressed. Therefore, the right verb to use when speaking about them is touch.
- In VPL, when we speak about the event blocks, we should use:
- obstacle detector
- ground detector
- In VPL, the active event and action elements are called blocks. The old use of button or card is deprecated.
- In VPL (1.4 and later), we have event-actions pairs, consisting of one event associated to one or more actions.