feature request: something like "remote sensor connections" in Scratch 1.4

[cwillisf]

This question came in from an educator and I think it'd be a great idea for a new extension:

Me & my students are coding various projects in Python & Javascript. For many of them we would like to add a visual front end interface using Scratch . There was Remote Sensor Connections in Scratch 1.4 but cannot find any feature which enables this (other than writing a whole new extension) for Scratch 3.
As an eg., for a Whats App bot, we just need to pass a string back n forth between our Python program and Scratch. What would be the best way to do it?

We might or might not want to follow the same remote sensors protocol but either way I think this could be a great stopgap until we can get third-party extensions going.

[cwillisf]

Note that because browser-based JavaScript in general cannot connect to a raw TCP socket, we basically have two choices for connecting to an external app / bot / etc.:

1. require the external application to connect using the WebSockets protocol in order to communicate directly with the Scratch extension, or
2. use Scratch Link as a go-between: the external application to talk with Scratch Link over a raw socket and Scratch Link would encapsulate that into a WebSocket connection with the Scratch extension.

We could in theory implement both paths and allow the user to choose, though that could lead to confusion. We'd have to be very careful in our block design.

Side note: it looks like the W3C TCP and UDP Sockets API has been abandoned. It's possible that it or something like it will come back at some point but it's unlikely to be a good option any time soon.

[kingraham612]

I am very interested in this functionality - has anything ever come of this? I am a researcher studying how young children with disabilities use powered wheelchairs. I have a powered wheelchair with a joystick that I can read real-time values from using python. Can I use these values to control a Scratch program?