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fibre-js

This directory provides JavaScript bindings for Fibre. Its home is located here. There's also a standalone repository for this directory here.

Current Status

So far fibre-js was only tested to run in Chrome but it should work in any browser that supports WebAssembly.

fibre-js currently supports the following transport providers:

NodeJS environments (incl Electron) are currently not supported due to issues with the WebUSB polyfill.

How to use

So you want your website to connect to some resource(s) using Fibre. Let's start with a simple HTML scaffolding.

<!doctype html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>fibre-js Test</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1 id="statusText">not connected</h1>
        <button id="connectBtn" disabled>Connect...</button>
    </body>
</html>

Now, right before the closing </body>, insert a script tag to load and open fibre-js:

<script type="module">
    import { fibreOpen } from './fibre.js';
    fibreOpen().then((libfibre) => {
        // fibre-js is ready to use!
    });
</script>

This will load the files fibre.js, libfibre-wasm.js and libfibre-wasm.wasm from the same directory the HTML file comes from so make sure those files exist.

Now that fibre-js is ready to use we can start discovering remote objects. For this we need to specify a filter string which tells Fibre where to look for objects. In this example we want to talk to a USB device that runs Fibre (more specfically an ODrive). The parameters we use here are something you can find out from reading the docs of your USB device or inspecting the device by using lsusb on a Linux or macOS computer.

const filter = 'usb:idVendor=0x1209,idProduct=0x0D32,bInterfaceClass=0,bInterfaceSubClass=1,bInterfaceProtocol=0';
const domain = libfibre.openDomain(filter);
const onFoundObject = async (obj) => {
    console.log("found an object!", obj);
    // TODO: do something with obj
}
domain.startDiscovery(onFoundObject);

Now that we have the object we can start calling functions on it. Let's assume our object has the property vbus_voltage. In the onFoundObject callback, add:

while (true) {
    document.getElementById("statusText").innerHTML = "vbus_voltage: " + (await obj.vbus_voltage.read());
    await new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, 100));
}

This will read the vbus_voltage property every 100ms and display the value on the web page.

Optionally you could add a callback to the obj._onLost promise in order to gracefully stop polling when the device disconnects.

Since we're using WebUSB in this example, there's one more thing left to do: The user needs to authorize the website (only once) to access the USB device. This must happen on a user gesture, which is why earlier we put a Connect-button into our HTML.

So directly after the call to libfibre.startDiscovery(), add:

document.getElementById("connectBtn").onclick = libfibre.usbDiscoverer.showDialog;
document.getElementById("connectBtn").removeAttribute('disabled');

That's it! You can now open the HTML page in the browser and should see something like this (using Chrome 86 on Linux):

Example

Note how the user doesn't need to manually reselect the device after the website is reloaded. The website is now already authorized to access the device so Fibre immediately connects to it. The same is true when the device is unpluggend and replugged to the computer.

You can find the complete example code here. A more elaborate example which can connect to multiple objects can be found here here.

Sidenote on WebUSB examples

WebUSB cannot be used on sites served via HTTP. To run the examples you must serve them from a HTTPS server. To do this, navigate to this directory and run:

openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem -days 10000 -nodes
python3 server.py

where server.py:

from http.server import HTTPServer, SimpleHTTPRequestHandler
import ssl
httpd = HTTPServer(('localhost', 8000), SimpleHTTPRequestHandler)
httpd.socket = ssl.wrap_socket (httpd.socket, 
        keyfile="key.pem", 
        certfile='cert.pem', server_side=True)
httpd.serve_forever()