Electron

[reconbot]

Electron continues to be the hardest part of using node serialport. People get stuck on the rebuild, new versions aren't immediatly supported and webpack has never and will never work with binary modules. Any ideas on how we can improve this situation?

[GazHank]

I think electron-webpack works with the binaries, although I have to admit I'm been building from source recently (in order to target the latest versions of electron - before the binaries were available).

I can take another look, and double check if you have more info on the issues

[reconbot]

I just mean that it's the number 1 reason people open support issues.

[GazHank]

So my thoughts are:

• Update the worked example to work with the latest versions of electron
• Extend / add to the example with electron-webpack
• consider automating the update of dependencies whenever a new version of node-abi is published?

Of course if we can enhance the docs along the way then let's do that too (I spotted a typo earlier :-( so will need to fix that)

[GazHank]

@reconbot can we use dependabot to keep node-abi up to date? I noticed it is running against the website repo, but doesn't seem to run here?

[hahobson]

@reconbot and @GazHank I wrote this in 2017 and have been trying to add a serial interface to it ever since. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSQ38fGncXQ Happy to share the code. Before covid, I worked in the theme park industry, and enjoy creating tools for show control and IoT. I am successfully using Node Serial on a webRTC robot. It took some time to get working, but it is stable and has been for some time now. Hope you can find a way to make serial access in Electron less complicated.

[reconbot]

Released #2360 which fixes installs on electron 14+

[reconbot]

Released a beta as 'serialport@10.0.0' which includes @GazHank's napi branch which should help a lot