Thunder Commander
Control your USB Thunder Missile Launcher with a web application based on node, express and AngularJS in a web browser of your choice.
You can see a live demo of the frontend (without a connected device) here: Thunder Commander client demo.
Features
- Works in every browser & system
- Responsive
- Control with mouse / touch / keyboard
Keyboard controls
- Left arrow: Turn left
- Right arrow: Turn right
- Up arrow: Turn up
- Down arrow: Turn down
- Space: Fire missile
Install
node
Install node if you don't have it.
libusb
You need libusb in order to install the dependencies.
Linux
sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config libusb-1.0-0-dev
Windows & Mac
Please contact me or create an issue if you need assistance.
Clone the repository
git clone git@github.com:TimPietrusky/ThunderCommander.git
Switch into the folder
cd ThunderCommander
Get dependencies
Linux
sudo npm install
Windows & Mac
Please contact me or create an issue if you need assistance.
Start the application
sudo node app
The application is now available under http://localhost:1337. If you want to change the port you have to edit the app.js file:
// Listen on port for connection
app.listen(1337);
Thunder Connector
In order to connect this web application with the real USB device I created the node module thunder-connector.
The journey
At first I tried to create a Chrome App, but the chrome.usb API is not allowed to call USB-HID devices, because the OS kernel grabs and interprets them before the user space code has a chance to do so.
After that I tried to create a node application with the help of the usb package, but it has not access to USB-HID devices too D:
That's why I started the third time from scratch with the node-hid package. But this time it worked :D
Thanks
- Nathan Milford for creating stormLauncher, because I copied the USB commando codes from his project
- Charley Drake from Dream Cheeky, because he gave me the original Developer Manual for the Thunder Missile Launcher
Author
2013 by Tim Pietrusky