ScratchX Plugin not working (connection refused)

[Andrew Rose]

Greetings from NYC!

I'm having browser issues, currently using Chrome v69. I followed all of the steps to install the ScratchX plugin so that I can program Vorpal, but cannot seem to get it to work for the life of me. It's quite frustrating because the pop-up asks me to see the tips window; however, it does not seem to exist. I opened up the console and saw that my connection is being refused. Anyone have any ideas why?

Thanks!

--Andrew

[Steve Pendergrast]

I have seen that message from time to time on a new install. I assume you've tried things like shutting down the browser and rebooting the entire machine?  I have seen cases where those kinds of things were necessary to get it working the first time. After the first time, it seems to work fine after that on a given machine.

If none of that works, are you behind a firewall that might be blocking ScratchX?  I have seen cases where, for example, a museum we were doing a talk in was not blocking Scratch but was blocking ScratchX.  ScratchX is needed for this kind of extension.

I agree that the messaging from Scratch is not very helpful!  i've never found the mystical tips window myself...

[Andrew Rose]

Thanks for the quick reply Steve. I tried the install at my school on several of our MacBooks, no luck after rebooting. I also tried at home on a personal MacBook, same results (red circle). A colleague of mine was able to get it up and running immediately on a home PC. I forwarded the issue to our IT dept and they were unable to get it working on our MacBooks. They believe the issue is coming from the plugin itself.

[Steve Pendergrast]

Hello again,

Could you load the Arduino IDE on one of the macs and just see if the IDE sees the gamepad nano when its plugged into usb?  It would show up under the TOOLS menu under PORT.  If you see choices for PORT, tell me what the choices are, exactly how they're spelled.

Also could you tell me what version of MAC OS you're using? We've tested back to Sierra but really old versions might not have the right driver.

The FTDI driver that interfaces to the nano should be on Mac already and should just work automatically. It definitely is back to at least Sierra. We use the more expensive FTDI version of the nano in the gamepad just for this very reason, it works automatically with Mac with no need to load serial usb drivers.

If you don't know how to install the Arduino IDE we have instructions here on our wiki:

http://vorpalrobotics.com/wiki/index.php/Vorpal_The_Hexapod_Arduino_Setup_Guide

To do this, you don't have to load all the libraries or anything like that, although for flashing future software updates it wouldn't hurt to do that. You don't even need to open up any code. You just need to install the IDE and open up the TOOLS/PORTS menu to see if the usb port is showing up.

[Andrew Rose]

We have Arduino installed on all of the macbooks. I see the nano as usbserial-A94ZNLD1. My machine is running Capitan (10.11.6) but our students are running High Sierra (10.13.5). Same results so far on both systems.

[Steve Pendergrast]

That is the correct type of name for an FTDI usb serial device so mac is seeing the device and mac has the driver.  Typically chrome on mac would seamlessly connect to that with nothing else required, assuming you've loaded the scratch plugin for chrome and the chrome helper app on mac (which I think you said you did).

Let me ask you this: do you see any other usb devices in that menu?  There is a known issue where if there are multiple serial devices the scratch extension might not pick up the right one. We had only really seen that on PC and we have a workaround for it there. We haven't seen it on mac before but there's a first time for everything. Serial devices are not very common these days but maybe something in your setup uses them?

So to be clear: is the one serial device the *only* thing that shows up in the PORT menu?  If there are others, what are their names?

[Andrew Rose]

Yes, I've loaded both the scratch plugin and helper. All of our computers show /dev/cu.Bluetooth-Incoming-Port in the PORT menu. Perhaps that's the issue?

[Steve Pendergrast]

I checked our testing mac.  It is running Sierra and we had Chrome version 66.  I tried one of our test robots and scratch connected immediately, green light, and had no trouble controlling the robot.

I then upgraded chrome to 69, latest release.  I rebooted the entire machine just to make sure everything was new.  Again, scratch had no trouble connecting. So it's not an issue with a chrome update or something like that.

So this must be something specific to your configuration, or something odd like a firewall setting or something which is  stopping chrome plugins from accessing the serial port.  I am going to ask some scratch experts what other causes of that particular message could be. But from what I can tell, this should all work.

Oh one more thing, I did see the cu.bluetooth-incoming-port on my IDE along with the serial device.  That's normal and doesn't indicate any kind of issue.

Another thing I could try is upgrading my test mac to high sierra to see if something in that versionn changed and triggered the issue. I'll look into that monday.

[Steve Pendergrast]

I did some additional checking today. I looked at settings in chrome and settings on the Mac to see if there was perhaps some security setting blocking the connection. I tried for about two hours but could not get anything to cause this issue.  The only thing that would stop Scratch would be to disable plugins like Flash, but your screen shot shows the main scratch screen so that's not it.

Next I will upgrade to High Sierra and see if this was an issue introduced there.

Here is a shot of my installed plugins, could you check the version numbers you have on this screen? In chrome navigate to chrome://system and then expand the EXTENSIONS section. The highlighted items are the ones critical for scratch to work.

[Andrew Rose]

Thanks for putting in the time! I checked out Chrome's extensions and was missing Makeblock mBot for ScratchX, so I installed it and restarted my machine, but unfortunately nothing seems to have changed...

[michelle wendt]

Yes, can't find that tips window either, but I did nuke chrome and then received the prompt to allow flash again when it stopped working for me today.  

On Monday, September 24, 2018 at 3:21:16 PM UTC-4, Steve Pendergrast wrote:

[Steve Pendergrast]

Andrew, could you try uninstalling then reinstalling chrome as suggested by Michelle to see if that helps? You'd probably have to load the plugin and helper again, but that only takes a couple of minutes.

[Wendt, Michelle]

Use task manager to quit 

On Nov 16, 2018, at 12:07 PM, Steve Pendergrast <pe...@vorpalrobotics.com> wrote:

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