The NodeJS thread

Development
1

I’m trying to talk to my radio in NodeJS via USB serial. At the moment, I’m already hitting a wall with the protobufs (which I have never touched before). Specifically, I’m trying to create the heoll message to tell the radio that I have connected but the protobuf message isn’t created correctly:

[…]

const root = protobuf.loadSync('Meshtastic-protobufs/mesh.proto');
const toRadio = root.lookupType('ToRadio');

[…]

  const message = toRadio.create({
    want_config_id: 12345678
  });
  const buffer = toRadio.encode(message).finish();
  console.log(util.inspect(toRadio.decode(buffer)));

The logged result is:
ToRadio {}

Does anybody have some good examples how to use more complex protobufs in NodeJS like those in Meshtastic?

2

Oh well, turns out, the parameter names in Node actually differ from the parameter names in the .proto file.

e.g. “want_config_id” in the proto file changes to “wantConfigId” in Node.

3

Did you get this to work? Very interested in communicating via USB serial using NodeJS.

4

Yeah, once you got your head wrapped around protobufs within protobufs within protobufs, it’s actually fairly trivial. I’ve been hit with a whole crapload of busy, so I didn’t manage to beautify my project and upload it to Github yet…

1 Like
5

Thanks for the reply @sgofferj, please push something when you can, curious to take a look, but without the time to start the journey on my own.

6

@sgofferj are you using the serialport package?
Also, take a look at the official library, it has protobufs decoding,encoding and generation functionality GitHub - meshtastic/meshtastic.js: Javascript library that provides an interface to Meshtastic devices

7

Jep, serialport. I actually looked at the meshtastic.js but that’s way over my skill level. Plus I have never looked at typescript before.
I’ll try to upload my code today or tomorrow.

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