search

adafruit / Adafruit-Pi-Finder

Find and set up your brand new Raspberry Pi
MIT License
850 stars 82 forks source link

Consider support for ChromeOS / Chrome browser extension #15

Open tdicola opened 9 years ago

tdicola commented 9 years ago

This is just a suggestion for future work, it could be interesting to consider adding support for ChromeOS or a Chrome browser extension / app to the bootstrap project. I don't think it's super critical, and it definitely could be a 'maybe / some day' feature because I think it's probably a non-trivial amount of work.

The reasoning for adding support is that ChromeOS is getting pretty popular, especially with schools. I have a cheapo Chromebook and it is a shockingly nice and cheap device. The big problem is that ChromeOS is quite limited and only runs Chrome extensions or apps. There are simple text editors and SSH clients, but no single app that helps you access and program a Raspberry Pi like pi bootstrap will do. If pi bootstrap supports finding your pi, setting up your pi to use occidentalis, web IDE, etc., and even gives you a shell to log in to the Pi then it could be a pretty sweet way to setup a Chromebook as a simple Raspberry Pi development & learning system.

The difficult thing would be making pi bootstrap run as a Chrome extension or app. I don't know a ton about them, but from what I understand they're generally HTML and javascript apps, so that's good that they're similar to what we have with atom-shell. The annoying thing though is that I don't think nodejs and atom-shell are ported over to work as a Chrome extension. Also making TCP connections and using native code is tricky on ChromeOS--you need to use their socket APIs, so most libraries and tools won't work, and native code has to be compiled with their PNaCL / native client stuff. I have a feeling it's probably at least a few weeks of time just to sort out how Chrome apps work.

Just throwing the idea out there that it might be interesting to look at what it would take to run pi bootstrap on ChromeOS / as a Chrome app. I was hoping I could find info googling around for people porting atom-shell apps to chrome apps and vice versa, but I really don't see anything. I'll keep an eye out for any good info on doing it and let us know if something comes up that could make it easy to do with pi bootstrap.

toddtreece commented 9 years ago

@tdicola very cool idea. i guess we should see if people are into this first before porting it anywhere. i'll do some research as soon as this stuff stabilizes.

toddtreece commented 9 years ago

This might be a good starting point to check out down the road: http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromiumos/platform/assets.git;a=blob;f=chromeapps/nassh/doc/faq.txt

SalvorinFex commented 8 years ago

@toddtreece I have just installed that SSH app and it works fine, but the pages for it give me a 404 error, now.

I would be very interested in a Chrome OS feature support for Pi Finder.