A friend of mine turned me on to Home Assistant which is a wonderful open source home automation platform. It's privacy forward (a hard requirement for me) and includes energy monitoring. It's got a neat event based system, lots of out of the box integrations and a large community of people making, hacking and helping. But what good is a home automation platform without hardware for home automations?
So one of the first things I got was a wifi ou…
(Cross posted from our Open Collective Page.)
This past year has brought a lot of really good change to Node Serialport. First and foremost we have a new maintainer who personally lead our c++ codebase to the modern area by implementing N-API support.
Please welcome Gareth Hancock to the team 👏
Now for the changes! (Jump into the upgrade guide if you just want to get started!)
The number one support issue we have has to do with ins…
I remembered there was such a thing as a serial mouse and I wondered how they worked. A bit of googling found me this link (which as of this posting has an SSL error). I'm going to reproduce it below but I wanted to write some notes about it first.
Serialport turns 9 this year. Back when it started NodeJS was a different environment than it is now. JavaScript was a different programming language than it is today. Since then I've pushed some major changes over the years to keep us modern. I made the (then) painful decision to drop old versions of node even though some devices would never see the updates to newer runtimes. Sticking to supporting only the LTS (Long Term Support) versions of No…
God help me if any of these have a serialport.
Update: They do have serialports!
I noticed this document about the "findings from the Defcon 25 Voting Machine Hacking Village". It's epic.
⚡This is a fantastic read about hacking a collection of voter machines. I've had hobby projects more secure.https://t.co/PBeCXs9HqK
— Francis Gulotta (@reconbot) August 4, 2017
Almost all of the machines lacked any encryption. Some of them had laughable "encry…
A few weeks ago I started maintaining node serialport after a long hiatus. We hadn't had a release in about a year and we had some outstanding bugs that I wanted to tackle. I had also introduced some complexity around testing, years ago, that was never removed and seemed to be making it harder to work on the project. Exactly a month since my first beta release we've released serialport@2.1.0 which is one of the larger releases we've ever had. Thi…
I was recently helping Sara debug an issue with a project for an upcoming book she's writing a chapter in. She was using Johnny-Five and a Spark Core to remotely control a boat with JavaScript.
The setup was a sparkfun motor driver and a standard servo hooked to A0 and A1 of the Spark Core.
Sara had one submersible thruster on the boat hooked up to the motor driver and a rudder hooked up to the servo. She was using VoodooSpark with Jo…
I don't write a ton of nodejs modules. I work on a few*, and I don't even work on them as much as I like. However I do end up using a ton of them. Here are some cool things I'd like to see that would make my life easier as a node developer.
We see the latest readme, and the latest version number, but no info on the old versions. You'd have to go download them and check their readme's and and docs.
The rea…
