etherport-client

Client-side virtual serial port for Rick Waldron's Etherport. Etherport-client is used to implement firmata-compatible boards and tethering hubs to control a board by a remote entity.

Usage Examples

The following usage examples can also be found in the examples directory of this package/project. Note, you'll need to manually install the required packages to run the examples (see require statements in the example code).

Tethering a Johnny Five IO-Plugin

Create an EtherPortClient with host and port properties referring to the peer transport endpoint of the EtherPort instance. Next, bind the resulting object to an IO-plugin using remote-io (see example below).

var EtherPortClient = require('etherport-client').EtherPortClient;
var RemoteIO = require('remote-io');
var RaspiIO = require('raspi-io');
var io = new RaspiIO();

io.on('ready', function() {
    console.log("ready");

    var sp = new EtherPortClient({
        host: '192.168.178.70',
        port: 41234
    });


    //listen for remote firmata messages
    var remoteIO = new RemoteIO({
        serial: sp,
        io: io
    });
});

Tethering a Serial Port (Chaining)

You can also simply chain Serial Port objects. For example, if you have a host with an Arduino board connected via USB and you want to access the Arduino board from a remote computer, you chain the Serial Ports on the host as follows.

var EtherPortClient = require('etherport-client').EtherPortClient;
var chainSerialPorts = require('etherport-client').chainSerialPorts;
var SerialPort = require("serialport").SerialPort;

chainSerialPorts(
    new EtherPortClient({
        host: '192.168.178.70',
        port: 41234
    }),
    new SerialPort("/dev/ttyUSB1", {
        baudrate: 57600
    })
);

Using StandardFirmataWiFi with ESP8266

By default, StandardFirmataWiFi with ESP8266 is a TCP Server. Thus, you'll need a TCP client transport for J5.

var five = require("johnny-five");
var EtherPortClient = require("etherport-client").EtherPortClient;
// update host to the IP address for your ESP board
var board = new five.Board({
    port: new EtherPortClient({
        host: "10.0.0.17",
        port: 3030
    }),
    timeout: 1e5,
    repl: false
});

board.on("ready", function() {
    console.log("READY!");
    var led = new five.Led(2);
    led.blink(500);
});

Debugging

For debugging purposes the debug package with topic "etherport-client" is used.

License

The MIT License (MIT), Copyright (c) 2015-2019 Marcus Wittig