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Communicate With Serial Port Using Javascript Inside Html: Advanced Techniques and Optimization Stra

  • guecautahero
  • Aug 17, 2023
  • 6 min read


The Web Serial API provides a way for websites to read from and write to a serial device with JavaScript. Serial devices are connected either through a serial port on the user's system or through removable USB and Bluetooth devices that emulate a serial port.


Calling requestPort() prompts the user to select a device and returns a SerialPort object. Once you have a SerialPort object, calling port.open() with the desired baud rate will open the serial port. The baudRate dictionary member specifies how fast data is sent over a serial line. It is expressed in units of bits-per-second (bps). Check your device's documentation for the correct value as all the data you send and receive will be gibberish if this is specified incorrectly. For some USB and Bluetooth devices that emulate a serial port this value may be safely set to any value as it is ignored by the emulation.




Communicate With Serial Port Using Javascript Inside Html



However, when continuously reading data from a serial device using a loop, port.readable will always be locked until it encounters an error. In this case, calling reader.cancel() will force reader.read() to resolve immediately with value: undefined, done: true and therefore allowing the loop to call reader.releaseLock().


Closing a serial port is more complicated when using transform streams (like TextDecoderStream and TextEncoderStream). Call reader.cancel() as before. Then call writer.close() and port.close(). This propagates errors through the transform streams to the underlying serial port. Because error propagation doesn't happen immediately, you need to use the readableStreamClosed and writableStreamClosed promises created earlier to detect when port.readable and port.writable have been unlocked. Cancelling the reader causes the stream to be aborted; this is why you must catch and ignore the resulting error.


The website can clean up permissions to access a serial port it is no longer interested in retaining by calling forget() on the SerialPort instance. For example, for an educational web application used on a shared computer with many devices, a large number of accumulated user-generated permissions creates a poor user experience.


On Android, support for USB-based serial ports is possible using the WebUSB API and the Serial API polyfill. This polyfill is limited to hardware and platforms where the device is accessible via the WebUSB API because it has not been claimed by a built-in device driver.


If you have a DLL library (this includes e.g. most Windows APIs) that allows you to communicate over serial port you can invoke it from Firefox chrome code (or content code with universalxpconnect privileges) by using ctypes.


However, this can be done in JavaScript using Node.js. It runs as a process rather than in a browser window and can access the file system. Specifically, there is already an npm module (node library) for serial communication: -serialport


To connect to the serial console using the browser-based client, your browser must support WebSocket. If your browser does not support WebSocket, connect to the serial console using your own key and an SSH client.


Web Serial API bridges the web and the physical world by allowing websites to communicate with serial devices, such as microcontrollers, 3D printers, removable USB, and Bluetooth devices that emulate a serial port.


Calling requestPort() prompts the user to select a device from the list and it returns a SerialPort object. Once we have a SerialPort object, then calling port.open() with desired baud rate, it will open the port. The baud rate specifies how fast the data is sent over the serial line. It is expressed in units of bits-per-seconds(bps).


In this codelab, you'll build a web page that uses the Web Serial API to interact with a BBC micro:bit board to show images on its 5x5 LED matrix. You'll learn about the Web Serial API and how to use readable, writeable, and transform streams to communicate with serial devices through the browser.


The Web Serial API provides a way for websites to read from and write to a serial device with scripts. The API bridges the web and the physical world by allowing websites to communicate with serial devices, such as microcontrollers and 3D printers.


The requestPort call prompts the user for which device they want to connect to. Calling port.open opens the port. We also need to provide the speed at which we want to communicate with the serial device. The BBC micro:bit uses a 9600 baud connection between the USB-to-serial chip and the main processor.


Serial communication is typically bidirectional. In addition to receiving data from the serial port, we also want to send data to the port. As with the input stream, we'll only be sending text over the output stream to the micro:bit.


Now let's move to the serial worker. This background task will be interacting with the serial device, by reading data from the serial port and posting it to the incoming queue, and by reading data from the outgoing queue and writing it to the serial port.


As mentioned in the previous sections the key for having i/o on the serial port without blocking the webserver is creating two separate threads running in parallel and communicating via shared queues.


In this lesson, we will apply our growing serial knowledge to a new context: the web! Now, it may seem a bit weird to use a web browser to communicate with a locally connected device. But, if you think about it, we actually do this all the time using video chat in our web browsers: the w3c MediaDevices API provides regulated access to media input devices like cameras and microphones.


However, WebUSB did not include support for USB-to-serial devices like Arduino. Thus, the Web Serial API was proposed and launched in Chrome 89 (in March 2021). This is what we will be using for the next few lessons.


Of course, if your Arduino board has built-in WiFi, you can communicate directly with web servers (as we explore a bit in the ESP32 IoT lesson); however, in this case, we assume either a tethered connection via serial over USB or a local wireless connection via serial over Bluetooth.


The Serial library reads and writes data to and from external devices one byte at a time. It allows two computers to send and receive data. This library has the flexibility to communicate with custom microcontroller devices and to use them as the input or output to Processing programs. The serial port is a nine pin I/O port that exists on many PCs and can be emulated through USB.


When properly configured, UART can work with many different types of serial protocols that involve transmitting and receiving serial data. In serial communication, data is transferred bit by bit using a single line or wire. In two-way communication, we use two wires for successful serial data transfer. Depending on the application and system requirements, serial communications needs less circuitry and wires, which reduces the cost of implementation.


The sample MCUs provide a full-duplex UART port, which is fully compatible with PC standard UARTs. The UART port provides a simplified UART interface to other peripherals or hosts, supporting full-duplex, DMA, and asynchronous transfer of serial data. The UART port includes support for five to eight data bits, and none, even, or odd parity. A frame is terminated by one and a half or two stop bits.


Familiarity with the UART communication protocol is advantageous when developing robust, quality-driven products. Knowing how to send data using only two wires, as well as how to transport a whole pack of data or a payload, will help ensure that data is transferred and received without error. Since UART is the most commonly used hardware communication protocol, this knowledge can enable design flexibility in future designs.


Qt also offers functionalities for inter-process communication (IPC). The class QProcess is used to start external programs. Qt D-Bus provides support for D-Bus, an interprocess communication and remoteprocedure calling mechanism. It mostly communicates via a central server application, called a bus. However, it is also possible to let applications communicate directly with each other. QSharedMemory provides access to a shared memory segment by multiple threads and processes. It is however also possible for a single process to exclusively lock that shared memory.


Qt makes it easy to embed web content into your Qt application using features of the Qt WebEngine layout engine. The Qt WebEngine module equips Qt with support for a broad range of standard web technologies that make it possible to embed HTML content styled with CSS and scripted with JavaScript into your Qt application. Qt WebEngine facilitates both integration with traditional QWidget based desktop applications as well as embedding into Qt Quick QML applications.


The cross-platform Qt Network module provides classes that make network programming portable and easy. It offers high-level classes (e.g., QNetworkAccessManager, QFtp) that communicate using specific application-level protocols, and lower-level classes (e.g., QTcpSocket, QTcpServer, QSslSocket) for implementing protocols.


The Qt Serial Port module provides a C++ API for communicating through serial ports, using the RS-232 standard. It works with physical ports and also with drivers that emulate these ports. Examples of serial port emulators include virtual COM ports, com0com emulators, and the Bluetooth SPP.


configureTerminator(device,terminator) defines the terminator for both read and write communications with the specified serial port. Allowed terminator values are "LF" (default), "CR", "CR/LF", and integer values from 0 to 255. The syntax sets the Terminator property of device.


ASCII terminator for read and write communication, specified as "LF", "CR", "CR/LF", or a numeric integer value from 0 to 255. Use this form when setting the same terminator for both read and write. When reading from the serial port with a terminator value of "CR/LF", the read terminates on the occurrence of CR and LF together. When writing to the serial port with a terminator value of "CR/LF", the write terminates by adding both CR and LF. This input argument sets the Terminator property. 2ff7e9595c


 
 
 

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