Hi all. I'm a school teacher and we are trying to integrate Arduino in to our projects in Design and Technology. We have a pretty strict policy on USB devices (threat of cyber attack) which prevents students from mounting storage devices on to their workstation PC's. After a bit of a headache installing the IDE on our machines (installed to appdata as opposed to program files for some reason), we find ourselves in a position where we can't mount the boards to the PC's.
The boards (ESP8266) are able to talk to the computer; I am able to use ESPTools online to flash BIN files to the board, but what we can't do it use it with the IDE;
The IDE does not let me select a COM port to talk to the board when any account that is not an administrator is logged in. We have had our IT technicians down to look and they have been able to successfuly connect and upload sketches but they cannot work out why, when a regular user logs in, they do not have the option to connect to a COM port and talk to the board?
Any advice on how to rectify this will be really helpful, we are at a dead end!
I understand the reasons for locking down USB ports to prevent storage devices being plugged in. However, you clearly have a teaching requirement that needs to access COM ports.
Your IT department will have set the policy and should be able to amend it accordingly. I imagine the restrictions have been set in Group Policy or possibly using some other security tool. If that is the case, then those in the IT department who are responsible for IT security policy should know what was used to apply the security policy to workstations. I do find ironic though that an online application can access a COM port but not a local user!.
It sounds like your organisational workstation security policy may need to be reviewed by the appropriate person(s) in your IT department so as to meet your teaching requirements.
I think this is a policy/permissions rather than an IDE issue.
Regarding the appdata problem, you might be able to use the portable version (supplied in a .zip file) instead. It could then be copied into a convenient place on the filesystem with appropriate permissions. Your IT department should be able to assist with this.
As a matter of curiosity, is this being installed via the Microsoft Store or using the downloadable installer?
Thanks for the response. I will pass this on to the IT technicians.
My understanding was that we installed originally from the downloadable installer; I'm told that both the MSI and the EXE installed to AppData... We have managed to work around this by using the portable version.
It is indeed interesting that the portable version works. This suggests that the COM ports are actually accessible to the user but there may be something about that way that the MSI/EXE versions are installed that is preventing the application from getting access to them. Maybe its not a security policy issue after all? Curious.
It's certainly interesting - we are seeing the same issue with the portable version too. If you log in with an administrator account it works without fault!
Best guess our end is that there's something wrong with the admin rights (as in, users are not able to open the program with enough permissions to see the COM ports).
Ah, I got the impression from the previous post that the portable version worked for users. If you have to use the administrator account there too, then we are back to the security policy issue. Evidently users do not have sufficient permissions to open a COM port..
One other possibility is that something else might be trying to use the
port although that seems rather remote. netstat -an or a tool like Portmon might help determine that, but I think it a long shot although we might be getting a little topic.