Accessing USB devices from node-webkit?

Question

I'm building a node-webkit app that needs to run on all 3 main desktop environments (windows, mac and linux) I need my app to connect to a plugged in USB device and I'm having a bit of trouble working out exactly how to go about this.

Is there an npm that would work across all OS's? Could I get one built in C++ that would work? Is there anything built in to node-webkit for interacting with devices (Devices API?)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You're almost certain to need a C/C++ module to make this happen, which means a build process is required. The good news is that you can just do the build on your machine and distribute the resulting binaries (x86 and x64) for Windows and OS X. Linux might be a little trickier, but on the other hand it's more likely to have a working build environment.

There are a few approaches, in order of ease:

• If your GPS device can present itself as a simple serial device (a COM port on Windows, or /dev/tty-usbserial on *nix), then you can just use serialport to connect to the device and receive raw data. There's a nmea module that can handle parsing the data. serialport works out of the box on all 3 platforms.

  If the drivers don't have an official option to present the device as a serial device, you may be able to find an unsupported way to make it happen with some searching.

• If the GPS device's drivers don't expose the device as a serial device, you'll need to write a C++ module that interfaces with the driver. You'll need to write code for all three platforms; the device manufacturer should provide documentation/an SDK. (See here for advice about getting started with native modules on Windows.)

• Last resort: you may be able to use the usb module to communicate directly with the device. This will probably involve reverse engineering the protocol that the device uses to communicate with the computer.