Note: This is a work in progress... still lots to do. Many of the things on this page haven't been implemented yet!
WebConnect provides a set of simple to use JavaScript APIs to make it easy to talk to hardware devices using your serial port. Yep, you can talk to hardware directly from a simple web-page!
It has been primarily designed for communicating with devices such as Arduino or mBed.
The APIs will allow a simple web-page page to communicate with the device, making it easy to build control panels or visualize sensor data.
- Plot a real time chart of sensor readings.
- Provide buttons and sliders to control a device.
- Create an editor for settings stored on the device.
- Upload new firmware via a simple user interface.
- Connect to a meshed wireless network node and visualize the network topology.
- Something that involves sharks with frickin' laser beams.
The main abstraction is SerialPort. This provides a simple mechanism to discover connected serial ports, connect to them, and send/receive messages.
Messages are an abstraction to simplify working with a stream of data in an asyncronous non-blocking world (the JavaScript runtime). Rather than receiving chunks of characters as they appear, the SerialPort API shall buffer the stream until it sees a logical message and pass your application the entire message.
By default, the SerialPort API shall break apart a stream of text at newline \n characters and treat each line as a message.
<script src="webconnect.js">
<script>
// Initialize serial port with default settings.
// If you don't specify a port name (e.g. COM3 on Windows
// or /dev/ttyBlah on Linux or OSX), it shall attempt to
// connect to the first device it finds on a serial port.
var serialPort = new SerialPort();
serialPort.open();
</script>
<!-- Send the string '1' or '0' (followed by new line) when
buttons are clicked. -->
<button onclick="serialPort.send('1')>On</button>
<button onclick="serialPort.send('0')>Off</button>
