MBot Scratch GUI

The MBot Scratch GUI is a fork of the Scratch Foundation GUI, which is a set of React components that comprise the interface for creating and running Scratch 3.0 projects. This fork contains a custom extension that enables Scratch blocks for controlling the University of Michigan MBot.

Installation

To install the MBot Scratch GUI, you must first install the MBot Scratch Virtual Machine. The VM contains the implementation of the MBot Extension Blocks.

git clone https://github.com/broderio/mbot_scratch_vm
cd mbot_scratch_vm
./install_scripts/install.sh

Once the VM is installed, navigate out of the VM directory and into the GUI directory to begin GUI installation:

cd ..
cd mbot_scratch_gui
./install_scripts/install.sh

To enable the service that will host the MBot Scratch application on boot, run the following commands.

cd services
./install_services.sh

Start the Application

To start the MBot Scratch GUI, run the following command. If you have enabled the service, then there is no need to start the application manually.

npm start

Development Notes

The original Scratch GUI and Scratch VM repositories receive about 100 commits per week because of dependency bot updates. This leads to Scratch creating several new releases of the VM and GUI every week. Every once in a while, we should sync our forks with the original repositories. To do this, use the following commands.

GUI

git remote add upstream https://github.com/scratchfoundation/scratch-gui.git
git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/develop

At this point, there will likely be merge conflicts. They should only be in package-lock.json. Resolve these conflicts before continuing. Once the merge conflicts are resolved, finish the rebase.

git rebase --continue
git config pull.rebase false
git pull
git push