Category: node.js

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.

Continue reading “Using REST as a command protocol for web-to-serial applications”

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:

• An Arduino, and the Arduino IDE
• An accelerometer. I used the ADXL326 from Adafruit
• an HTML5-capable browser. I used Chrome, but Opera or Firefox or Safari will work too)
• node.js and the following libraries for node:
  • express.js
  • socket.io
  • node-serialport

This post assumes you understand:

Continue reading “Serial to JSON in Node.js and Arduino”