I've just launched the Web Serial App controller into Beta - a web app that uses the new Web Serial API that allows communication between browsers (Chrome and Edge) and serial devices such as Arduino or RaspberryPi.
The interface is inspired by Windows XP (using XP.css) - when working on the app, I was reminded of some of the software I used in the 00's when connecting to serial devices.
Currently there are no user features, but otherwise it's reasonably feature complete in being able to connect to devices and communicate with them.
I'm currently investigating some options to support user-based features such as saving device information and saving snippets for devices. I'm also investigating the gRCP API for the Arduino API which would allow for compiling of code to be sent to devices.
I dug around and found that Mozilla considers Web Serial API to be "harmful" to the web.
> Mozilla's Position - Devices that offer serial interfaces often expose powerful, low-level functions over the interface with little or no authentication. Exposing that sort of capability to the web without adequate safeguards presents a significant threat to those devices.
Ah that's a shame, I understand their concerns to be honest, but they could just hide it under an about:config flag so only people who really need it can use it.
Yep only in the Chromium based browsers I'm afraid (https://caniuse.com/?search=Web%20serial) and knowing Apple will probably never make it Safari in the next 10 years.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 27.0 ms ] threadI've just launched the Web Serial App controller into Beta - a web app that uses the new Web Serial API that allows communication between browsers (Chrome and Edge) and serial devices such as Arduino or RaspberryPi.
The interface is inspired by Windows XP (using XP.css) - when working on the app, I was reminded of some of the software I used in the 00's when connecting to serial devices.
Currently there are no user features, but otherwise it's reasonably feature complete in being able to connect to devices and communicate with them.
I'm currently investigating some options to support user-based features such as saving device information and saving snippets for devices. I'm also investigating the gRCP API for the Arduino API which would allow for compiling of code to be sent to devices.
It's fully open source and feedback is welcome.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
> Mozilla's Position - Devices that offer serial interfaces often expose powerful, low-level functions over the interface with little or no authentication. Exposing that sort of capability to the web without adequate safeguards presents a significant threat to those devices.
From https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webserial
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They've marked it as WONTFIX, as of 9 months ago.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=926940
Discussion: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336
It seems unlikely to be implemented in Firefox, unless they change their mind or the standard is updated to address security concerns.