JavaScript on Things: Hacking Hardware for Web Developers

Lyza Danger Gardner

ISBN: 9789386052025

448 pages

Description

This book teaches the fundamentals of electronics and embedded systems for folks who are comfortable with basic JavaScript but who may have no experience what-so-ever wiring up even the simplest circuit. Emphasis is put on the topics that will be new to software developers: the critical basics of designing and building circuits, hardware components (sensors, motors, resistors, and the like), and the interface between hard-ware and software. Over the course of this book, you’ll get hands-on with a variety of development boards, hardware components, and software platforms. For the experiments (small projects) in the first two-thirds of the book, we’ll use the Johnny-Five open source Node.js framework with the Arduino Uno development board. Johnny-Five’s API pro-vides many intuitive component classes that you can use to quickly prototype your gadgets and inventions.

About the Author

Lyza Danger Gardner likes figuring out how to do things. In turn, she likes to teach others how to do new things, too. Lyza cofounded Cloud Four, a web consultancy in Portland, Oregon. She’s been building web things for over 20 years, advocating for elegant standards, education, and compassion in pursuit of the best possible future web. You can find her online at www.lyza.com or @lyzadanger on Twitter. As a counter-point to her futuristic technical vantage, she lives in the forest in Vermont and enjoys anachronistic hobbies. She reads and reads and reads.

Table of Contents

Book Review

Part 1 -- A Javascripter’s Introduction To Hardware

1. Bringing JavaScript and hardware together

2. Embarking on hardware with Arduino

3. How to build circuits

Part 2 -- Project Basics: Input And Output With

4. Sensors and input

5. Output: making things happen

6. Output: making things move

Part 3 -- More Sophisticated Projects

7. Serial communication

8. Projects without wires

9. Building your own thing

Part 4 -- Using Javascript With Hardware In Other Environments

10. JavaScript and constrained hardware

11. Building with Node.js and tiny computers

12. In the cloud, in the browser, and beyond

13. Building with Node.js and tiny computers

14. In the cloud, in the browser, and beyond