chrome-easel-driver-app

Chrome Easel Driver App

This Chrome App will act as a Easel local driver on any system that runs Chrome.

Try It

Consider this very much aplha software, it's only been tested against the Machine Setup & homing features of Easel. I haven't had a chance to try carving anything. So be careful and watch your machine!

To install a pre-built release in chrome:

1. Download the latest .zip from the releases page
2. Extract it somewhere
3. Go to the extensions page
4. Open the menu (top right, 3 dots)
5. Go to more tools >
6. Click extensions
7. Make sure Developer mode is checked at the top-right
8. Click Load unpacked extension...
9. Select the directory where the .zip was extracted
10. Click Launch

While the Easel Driver window is open, it should respond as the normal local driver would.

Dev Requirements

You will need the following available for development:

• Node 6
• Go 1.6
• gopherjs for compiling Go to javascript
• xar archive utility
• cpio
• gunzip
• EaselDriver-0.2.6.pkg

Installing Needed Tools

Node can be installed in your home directory by using nvm, a bash one-liner is available on the repo page. nvm handles setting all of the many environment variables node and npm require for use.

Go may be installed via package or, on Linux, by extracting the tarball and setting GOROOT to the extracted directory. You will also need to set GOPATH to some directory to use for packages. Add $GOROOT/bin and $GOPATH/bin to your PATH variable.

gopherjs can be installed/updated with the following command: go get -u github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs

xar and cpio can generally be found in your package manager on Linux

gunzip -- you already have this most likely

Building

Import the iris libs by running ./import.sh EaselDriver-0.2.6.pkg where the filename (EaselDriver-...) is the path to the Mac version.

Run npm install to install all node-related dependencies

Run gopherjs get from the server/ directory to install all go-related dependencies

To build, run ./build.sh and the app will get build into the app/ directory (that you can then load into chrome)

How It Works

The Easel Local Driver handles enumerating serial devices, talking to them, and parsing some basic info around the responses (like serial number, grbl info, etc...).

The code in this repo shims the network and serial calls to use chrome APIs instead of the native libraries normally used, making cross-platform easier (since Chrome did the work).

It opens a tcpServer in chrome, and uses the Go runtime http server, and a socket-io compatible library.

Most of the code is around shimming the socket.io/websocket and http server stuff. As far as actually getting and connecting serial devices in Chrome, that part took very little effort. (hint hint)