BoneScript is a node.js library for physical computing on embedded Linux, starting with support for BeagleBone.
Information on the language is available at http://nodejs.org.
To check the version and to see if BoneScript is in your path, try running:
node -pe "require('bonescript').getPlatform().bonescript"
Additional documentation is available at http://beagleboard.org/bonescript.
The concept is to use Arduino-like functions written in JavaScript to simplify learning how to do physical computing tasks under embedded Linux and to further provide support for rapidly creating GUIs for your embedded applications through the use of HTML5/JavaScript web pages.
BoneScript comes installed on your BeagleBone. To update to the latest revision, use 'npm' on a recent BeagleBoard.org Debian image from https://beagleboard.org/latest-images and perform:
TERM=none sudo npm cache clear
TERM=none sudo npm install -g --prefix /usr/local --unsafe-perm bonescript
sudo shutdown -r now
Testing on other distributions is limited.
There are some additional installation steps that can be performed, but are typically installed by other mechanisms on the BeagleBoard.org Debian images. These setup background services (bone101 webserver with bonescript RPC and bonescript autorun service) as well as configure environment variables for these services and other globally run scripts.
sudo cp bonescript/etc/default/node /etc/default/node
sudo cp bonescript/etc/profile.d/node.sh /etc/profile.d/node.sh
sudo cp bonescript/systemd/\* /lib/systemd/system
sudo systemctl enable bonescript.socket
sudo systemctl enable bonescript-autorun.service
To have your applications launch on startup, simply drop them into the /var/lib/cloud9/autorun folder. Moving them out of that folder will kill the processes. You are expected to only drop in already bug-free apps into this folder as there isn't a good way to perform debug on them.
There's still a lot of development going on, so be sure to check back on a frequent basis. Many of the fancier peripherals aren't yet supported except through performing file I/O.
For a BoneScript application, you must currently manually 'require' the bonescript library. Functions are then referenced through the object provided back from require.
I started out trying to provide Arduino-like setup/loop functions, but the idea really isn't a good match for JavaScript. Using JavaScript's native flow works best, but the familiar functions are enough to give you a boost in your physical computing productivity.
Here's an example:
var b = require('bonescript');
b.pinMode('P8_12', b.INPUT);
b.pinMode('P8_13', b.OUTPUT);
setInterval(copyInputToOutput, 100);
function copyInputToOutput() {
b.digitalRead('P8_12', writeToOutput);
function writeToOutput(x) {
b.digitalWrite('P8_13', x.value);
}
}
The 'P8_12' and 'P8_13' are pin names on the board and the above example would copy the input value at P8_12 to the output P8_13 every 100 ms.
When a callback is provided, the functions will behave asynchronously. Without a callback provided, the functions will synchronize and complete before returning.
Uses https://github.com/voodootikigod/node-serialport
Uses https://github.com/korevec/node-i2c
new in 0.7.0 Runs on BeagleBone Blue; or BeagleBone Black or BeagleBone Black Wireless with BeagleBoard.org Robotics Cape
This code is totally unoptimized. The list of possible optimizations that run through my head is staggering. The good news is that I think it can all be done without impacting the API, primarily thanks to the introspection capabilities of JavaScript.
Eventually, this is planned to enable real-time usage, directly from JavaScript. The plan is to attact the ability to use this programming environment in real-time on several fronts:
The JavaScript language provides some features that I think are really cool for doing embedded programming and node.js does some things to help enable that. The primary one is that the I/O functions are all asynchronous. For embedded systems, this is especially useful for performing low-latency tasks that respond to events in the system. What makes JavaScript so much easier than other languages for doing this is that it keeps the full context around the handler, so you don't have to worry about it.
Most of these fixes came from a Google Summer of Code 2018 project