Refactor Serial port libraries about espruinotools HOT 8 CLOSED

I am working on a node.js module to make HM-10 BLE serial available through a socket or TCP/IP port. Can you provide any direction on how to implement it to make it compatible with this change?

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Do you think you could explain in a bit more detail - will you be using an Espruino board for this?

It seems like you could do what you want just using node-serialport and node's socket library. I'm not sure you'd need to use EspruinoTools, in which case this change wouldn't affect you.

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I have added a HM-10 module to my Espruino board and my goal is to use it as a wireless serial connection for the WebIDE. It is entirely possible that I'm making this more complicated than it needs to be but:

• It seems the HM-10, since it's BLE and doesn't support SPP, does not create a tty device. If there's already a way to accomplish this, I'd love to hear it!
• So I decided to make a node.js module to provide a stream interface to the HM-10 (https://github.com/xorbit/node-hm-ble). I can use this from node to communicate with the Espruino terminal when it's battery powered.
• Now I'd like to somehow tie that in to the WebIDE. I'm trying to figure out the best way to do that. I can pipe the stream to a socket, or to a pseudo tty. When I try the socket (or TCP/IP port), it works fine using telnet, but AFAIK there isn't a way yet for the WebIDE to talk to a socket. When I try the pseudo tty with a serial terminal, the Espruino seems to receive everything I type, but for some reason half of what it sends back to me gets lost somewhere. There are also some permission issues to figure out that prevent the WebIDE from picking it up.

Any thoughts or recommendations to figure this out? I would love to hear that it's an already solved problem and I'm way off with my approach. :-)

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Ahh, thanks! I'll have a think and will get back to you about this tomorrow :)

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It'd be great if there was a way to make it appear as a tty device. It looks like you may be able to use mkfifo or similar to create a tty from your userspace code - it might be an easy solution and wouldn't then be specific to Espruino (whether it could fool chrome enough to appear in the list of ttys I don't know!).

The other nice option would be to try and roll everything into one program. The Espruino Web IDE should be able to run with Node-Webkit with a few changes, and then you could just use BLE directly. I guess that's likely to end up being significantly more work, but I'd love it if that happened - a lot of people have been after a self-contained Web IDE executable.

So yes, I guess your options are pretty limited - as you say the socket route might be good and useful for the future (if it's possible - I'm not sure what socket support Chrome Web Apps provide). It'd be great if you wanted to create a new serial.js that implemented Espruino.Core.Serial, and to then just have all the other serial_*.js register some kind of handler, although that's something I could do when I get a bit of time if you wanted?

If you just want to create a single-use Web App then I'd just create a serial_socket.js file in the same style as the others. When I do implement this bug hopefully the changes to the files won't be massive - and if yours is in GitHub I'll make the changes to that as well.

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I sent you a pull request for a quick and dirty serial-over-socket implementation that can be used with my BLE socket driver @ https://github.com/xorbit/node-hm-ble. I''m sure this needs some work but check if it works for you and if you like the concept, and I may put in some more time to integrate this.

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Thanks - just pulled that in. It looks good... When I sort this bug out, it should allow users to choose between the different communication methods... At that point I'd move the throttling code as well, so it should really clean up all the serial_*.js files.

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Done now

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