Serial api on chrome extensions

[Joachim Haagen]

Hello,

I am building an online tool that will be used in schools in Norway to program Arduinos. The goal is to have a system - in Norwegian - that is block-based and easy to use (blockuino.no). So far ,the system generates the source code, which the students need to copy from the web app to the Arduino IDE. This is OK and goes hand-in-hand with learning the students to make use of the machines features, and copy+paste between apps is OK.

However, some districts have standardized on Chromebooks, and many disallow installation of third party applications, so installing Arduino IDE is not a viable option. I have built a Chrome App that I can use for this purpose, which is fine for the Chromebook issue. However, it would then also be nice if Blockuino could upload directly to an Arduino from PC-based Chrome-browsers too. But, since Google is not allowing new apps into the Web Store for these platforms, and the Chrome Extensions does not have a Serial API, I am a bit stuck in this regard.

WebUSB seems to not be a viable solution either, as the APIs are not enabled by default in Chrome, while the Arduino Uno (which most of the schools do have) are not compatible with USB 2.1. Is there an option open for PC-based Chrome, or would my time be better spent writing a native client for Windows and Mac?

Very Best Regards,
Joachim Haagen Skeie

[Myke Predko]

I don’t think anybody has replied to Joachim, but my company (Mimetics - https://www.mimetics.ca) have the same requirements and concerns regarding Chromebooks versus PCs in schools. We do have a Chrome App (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jade-support/gchcbahadlpkgkpenlkfgdgkdjedepod?hl=en) which has been around for a while but I know that in the future we will want to add more apps as it is a great platform for classrooms.

We felt that using the Chrome Apps was a great choice for our application as Chrome is available for the main computers used in schools (Chromebooks, PCs and Macs) and has worked very well. Originally we used the serial API (Joachim, I'm a bit confused by your comments about this - can you not use chrome.serial (https://developer.chrome.com/apps/serial)? I know it works very well (we put in a fix for Macs a couple of years ago).) but now we're using a Bluetooth connection.

How can we change the decision to stop allowing new Chrome Apps?

myke

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