Configuring a Raspberry Pi to Talk to Delcom USB With Node.js

Took a little digging, but I have Node.js 0.10.24 and Node-Hid successfully installed and talking to my Delcom USB indicator.  I wanted to take a minute to document the steps I took.  Before following the steps in this article, make sure you have your Raspberry Pi hooked up to the network.

Getting the OS Ready

Start by updating all your packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

You will need a couple of additional packages required by node-hid, a node library used to communicate with USB HID devices like the Delcom USB Indicator:

sudo apt-get install libudev-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev

Node.js Install

As least as I write this you cannot get Node.js 0.10.x using apt-get. Instead, you have to install it yourself. Here’s the steps I used for node 0.10.24:

sudo mkdir /opt/node
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.24/node-v0.10.24-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz
tar xvzf node-v0.10.24-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz
sudo cp -r node-v0.10.24-linux-arm-pi/* /opt/node

You’ll also have to put node into your path and set NODE_JS_HOME by editing your profile. Open up the profile:

sudo nano /etc/profile

Put the following right before you see “export PATH”:

NODE_JS_HOME="/opt/node"
PATH="$PATH:$NODE_JS_HOME/bin"

Once you reboot, you can verify the node installation by issuing the following command:

node -v

It should print out v0.10.24 on your console.

Node-Hid and Test Project

Now it’s time to create a little node project to test things out. This example will set things up in a directory called ~/nodetest:

mkdir ~/nodetest
cd ~/nodetest
npm install node-hid

You can then use nano to create a js file to execute with node:

nano test.js

Here’s the code:

var hid = require('node-hid');

var devices = hid.devices();

console.log('Devices:')
console.log(devices);

Once you plug in the Delcom device, you can run the app to find it as follows:

node test.js

You should see output like this:

[ { vendorId: 4037,
    productId: 45184,
    path: '0001:0005:00',
    release: 32,
    interface: 0 } ]

If you have multiple USB HID devices attached, they will appear in the list as well. The one with the vendorId given above is the Delcom device.

One More Thing

I prefer to write code on my Mac using Webstorm.  I get access to my Raspberry Pi console using ssh and transfer files with help from the netatalk AFP client installed as follows:

sudo apt-get install netatalk