Using serial comms from the browser is really important in educational robotics programs. Both First and Vex platforms support it. Kids can access the web based coding environment on their chromebooks, and send code to the robots with a usb cable.
We recently restarted our middle school robotics club. The school had a lot of old Vex EDR equipment for which the coding software is windows only so that really limited what we could do related to coding. Glad to see Firefox getting up to speed on this.
WebSerial was just introduced in Firefox 151. It was already available for 5 years in Chromium based browser. It's so new in Firefox that even caniuse is not up-to-date: https://caniuse.com/web-serial.
Great to see Firefox getting on board. I wrote an alternative to Arduino's serial plotter that works in Chrome. Hopefully it's not too hard to get Firefox working too? Patches welcome:
That's a start at improving something. But it won't rid itself of the Playskool/Fisher-Price gimmick factor or have any lasting effect until we can convince JS developers to write their own tools in a standards-compliant dialect and use standardized APIs so that contributors can use the runtime they already have installed instead of being cajoled and browbeaten into installing NodeJS or Bun or Deno or whatever to do what the browser runtime is perfectly capable of: opening a project directory, executing the code comprising the build script, and outputting the build artifacts when it's done.
I used WebSerial + WebSockets during hardware to prototype some connected hardware (on boards that didn’t have WiFi).
Plug in to USB, fire up the web app, and then press a button in NY to light up LEDs in SF – it was exciting stuff!
I never tried actually programming the boards over WebSerial; that obviously opens up many more use cases. I’m thinking about the success that p5.js has had in the creative coding community, largely driven (I think) by a low barrier to entry since it just requires a web browser to get started.
We recently restarted our middle school robotics club. The school had a lot of old Vex EDR equipment for which the coding software is windows only so that really limited what we could do related to coding. Glad to see Firefox getting up to speed on this.
https://github.com/skybrian/serialviz
Plug in to USB, fire up the web app, and then press a button in NY to light up LEDs in SF – it was exciting stuff!
I never tried actually programming the boards over WebSerial; that obviously opens up many more use cases. I’m thinking about the success that p5.js has had in the creative coding community, largely driven (I think) by a low barrier to entry since it just requires a web browser to get started.