I just tested in Windows 7 in Chrome 36 with a clean install of Breakout v0.3.1. I didn’t have any issue getting the examples to work.

Make sure your settings panel looks like this (with the path to the Breakout folder on your system):

And try the firmware example. You should see the following results:

Also, I’m not sure if this would make a difference or not, but if you’re firewall is enabled, make sure port 8887 is accessible.