Using user-space USB drivers: Part 8
Over the weekend I saw this tweet from Reilly Grant, one of the main developers of WebUSB:
I wish someone would sit down with the Linux drivers for proprietary USB serial chips like FTDI and Prolific and port them to JavaScript with WebUSB as a polyfill for the Serial API.https://t.co/ebiiBdIf7jhttps://t.co/yrgS4dgCK3https://t.co/H88w5KDnsFhttps://t.co/uCeLuDlJJs
— Reilly Grant → @reillyeon@toot.cafe (@reillyeon) September 7, 2018
The reason this would be so valuable is that these are the chips for which you aren't guaranteed that the OS driver is even properly configured and so are perfect candidates for quality WebUSB support.
— Reilly Grant → @reillyeon@toot.cafe (@reillyeon) September 7, 2018
Now, if you've been following this blog you may know that I've been working on JavaScript drivers for three different USB serial chips:
The only issue is that they're all written with node-usb instead of WebUSB, as I'm targeting Electron. Now, porting them shouldn't be too hard and it something I would really like to do. Today I discovered Niels Leenheer, creator of html5test.com, even has a $500 bounty out:
This would probably the single most useful thing for WebUSB for me personally. We need this. I’ll donate $500 towards the first project or developer that can get this working. https://t.co/h4sFxeXyw2
— Niels Leenheer (@html5test) September 9, 2018
I found a GitHub comment saying it's possible to get WebUSB working in Electron, so maybe I should give that a try again. node-usb is barely maintained at the moment, so getting everything working on WebUSB instead would be great! Or if someone else decides to build WebUSB versions using my code, that will be great too.