Node.js for Embedded Systems

Foreword

It is a wonderful time to be playing with physical computing!

In the early 2000s, there were few options for any given physical computing technology. If you wanted to measure humidity you had one option—with the annoying subtleties of that particular manufacturer. Thanks to the pressure of free market forces and open source hardware, by the mid-2010s there were dozens of manufacturers all creating similar humidity sensors. The pinouts were identical, the protocols were identical (and finally standardized to I2C), and the prices were falling. Today I don’t have to wonder if the sensor came from silicon foundry X or Y, I just have to decide “do I want to measure the humidity inside my lunchbox?” I plug in whatever humidity sensor is most readily available and let the library handle the necessary low-level interactions to get the data. I am no longer worrying about the underlying hardware; I can instead concentrate on the user experience.

The user experience is central to the popularity of Arduino. Its simplified interface enabled the crashing of two worlds: designers and engineers. Similarly, the JavaScript and the Node.js ecosystem are easy to learn for designers and non-professional programmers. In the future the mindset of designers and users of hardware will matter more than who holds the keys to building electronics. Thanks to the Web, baseline tools (gcc, serial bootloaders, skillet reflow, etc.) are universal and now easy to master. Anyone with a hot plate and a ...