Category: node.js

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What I Did in January

January turned out to be a good time for tidying up my gitHub repos, because it was cold and there was no incentive to travel, and I had to quarantine for a few days in the midst of it (no symptoms, thankfully). As a result, I updated a few things. All of this is going into my connected devices class this semester.

Just enough HTML for Connected Devices – If a device connects to your phone or laptop, you’re going to need to build an interface for it at some point, and the Document Object Model (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) is a quick way to do it. I put together some examples for various ways to do that. Most of this is a thin wrapper around the Mozilla Developer Network pages, with a focus on connecting. A couple of highlights:

MQTT Examples – I’ve been working on this one since last summer in bits and pieces, but now there’s enough there to be useful. All microcontroller examples were written with the Arduino Nano 33 IoT, though any of the WiFi-enabled Arduinos should do the trick. The browser-based stuff is all in p5.js, but I’ll add some plain vanilla JS examples soon. There are some nice GUI tools available now too, like MQTT Explorer and shiftr.io’s desktop broker. My favorite example in this repo is the WebMIDI to MQTT examples.

Websocket Examples – nothing special here, but the topic comes up enough that having a set of examples on hand was something I needed. Easy to compare and contrast Websockets and MQTT now too. A lot of folks don’t know the ArduinoHTTPClient library can also do websockets, so I threw that in.

Pi Recipes – this is an older repo, but I updated it to make it a bit easier to find things. Quite pleased with the timelapse webcam example that Nun Tansrisakul inspired me to write.

WiFi101/WiFiNINA Examples – another older repo, but a bit better organized now, I hope. Moved some things to their own repos when it was merited.

Display Examples – still working on this one, but I got obsessed with making QR code examples from an Arduino, so I wrote something using Richard Moore’s arduino qrcode library, then duplicated it for ePaper, TFT, and OLED screens. Figured it was as good a time as any to put together what experience I have working with screens and microcontrollers.

HID Examples – not prettied up yet, but put together a few more notes on using the HID examples for Arduino.

Node Examples – also not prettied up yet, but added notes for using these on Glitch or on a CLI.

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Node.js on the Arduino Yún

Recently, Federico Fissore added node.js to the package repository for the Arduino Yún. Here’s how you get node to communicate with the Arduino processor on the Yún via the Bridge library.

To do this, you’ll need an Arduino Yún, a microSD card, a microUSB cable and a wifi connection. You should be familiar with the basics of the Arduino Yún and node.js in order to get the most out of this post.

All of the code for this post can be found on my GitHub repository.

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Using REST as a command protocol for web-to-serial applications

Updated 19 Jan 2014

The address you type into your browser’s address bar is often the location of a particular document on a server. For example, http://tigoe.net/index.html refers to an HTML document living in the main directory of my server, tigoe.net. But URLs can be used to represent more than a file address. They can also be used to set or get the state of web-based application. For example, http://www.mystore.com/item/3045/price could be used to tell the application you want the price of item 3045. If you want the set the price, you could use http://www.mystore.com/item/3045/price/4.99. Web frameworks like Sinatra (for Ruby), Flask (for Python) and Express (for JavaScript through node.js) make it possible for you to build a web server that uses Representational State Transfer, or REST, as the control protocol for your application.

REST is a style of formatting URLs such that the URL itself describes the state of the thing it’s addressing. In the store example above, the URL is a representation of the item in the store (http://www.mystore.com/item/3045/price).  To change the state of the item, you use another URL to represent that change (http://www.mystore.com/item/3045/price/4.99).  At its simplest, REST means organizing your web application so that the URLs provide clear, sensible meaning as to what’s going on. For a more detailed explanation, see Understanding REST or Building Web Services the REST way. In this post, you’ll learn how to use a RESTian scheme as a communications protocol between a microcontroller and a web page using node.js and a little client-side JavaScript in the middle.

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Serial to JSON in Node.js and Arduino

Node.js is great for making web services, and node-serialport makes it very easy to connect to serial devices on your computer. In my last post, I showed how to connect an Arduino microcontroller application to a web page using Node.  This post expands on that, introducing how to use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) from Arduino all the way through to your HTML page.

The beauty of node is that it’s JavaScript, so you get to use everything Javacript gives you, including its wonderful lightweight data format, JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation. JSON describes data objects using arrays of key-value pairs separated by colons. If you want to add more properties to an object, just add another array element. the value of an element can be a JSON object itself. When you’ve got an application that uses JavaScript on the server side and on the client side, it makes sense to use JSON to describe your data all the way through, so you can just pass it around without a lot of conversion.

Arduino doesn’t speak JSON natively. There are a couple JSON parser libraries out there for Arduino, but I haven’t seen one that I like yet. All of the ones I’ve seen expect more pointer knowledge from the user than I’d like.  So for this example you’ll assemble your own JSON string using Arduino’s String class, and letting node.js turn it into a JSON object.

To make this happen you’ll need:

This post assumes you understand:

  • How to use Arduino, including how to send serial data
  • How to write a web page, and what a server is
  • A little about JavaScript
  • A little about the command line
  • Beginning experience with node.js.  For my brief intro, see this post.

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Serial to Browser using node.js

Updated 28 July 2015

This is a brief introduction to using node.js and websockets to connect a serial device, like an Arduino microcontroller, to a browser.

To make this happen you’ll need:

This post assumes you understand: