More than 1 Espruino at 1 time??

Hi there,

Im very new to using Espruino so please bare with me.. Im currently working on a project the requires me to use more than 1 Espruino at one time. Im plugging them into a USB hub then into the computer running Mac OSX. Is there something in the code to change, like an IP address in the code of something? Where would it be in the coding. Im new to coding also!

Cheers in advance
Connor

Hi Connor,

No problem! The boards should be fine being connected to the same computer. All you need to care about is how you communicate with them... They'll each have a different device name (beginning with /dev/tty), so you just need to use the correct device for each one.

The Web IDE will happily connect to each, but you can only have one Web IDE window open at a time at the moment, so you can only actually communicate with one that way. However you could use something like screen or if you're sending commands you could look at this page on controlling Espruino from code running on your mac.

Finally, if you don't have any need to send data to or get it from your Espruinos, you don't even need a Mac to connect them to - just use a USB charger or a battery!

Hope that helps!

@Gordon, in other words, the WebIDE can be connected to exactly one board at one time... and it is the board (dev) which is picked from the list on connect. Is that correct?

So I'm thinking of some WebIDE configuration that speeds up this process. For example to have icons in the 'so empty top bar' for each of the preconfigured connections... and clicking on a not connected one disconnects from another eventually connected one and connects to the just clicked one... currently I'm heavily fooling around in the IDE... I just love it... (was thinking of having multi-doc/editor UI... at least for a few files... to work on module/s and at the same time on app code that uses that/those module/s... I'm though very well aware that the WebIDE is intentionally and by design kept as lean and simple - but NOT KISS - to give a smooth entry to any new comers and users not familiar with complex IDE's... such as eclipse and a-like...

@allObjects yes, just one board at one time - but that doesn't mean that only one board can be 'working' :)

Honestly I'm not sure about the extra buttons. All you're suggesting doing is replacing 3 clicks (disconnect, connect, select port) with 1, and adding a load of icons and configuration instead.

However, I would totally support tweaking the Web IDE so you could have more than one IDE window open at a time (and allowing the title to change to show the currently connected device). I don't think that should be a big issue.

Having more than one window could really help, as you'd then have multiple consoles with multiple sets of history.

@Gordon, I see... you go a bit a different route... my idea was just to speed up the switching between 'physically connected' running boards. Your - multi-window - solution goes much further and gives each board its own ecosystem.

The multi-window solution has other advantages: multiple windows give multi-file editor 'for free'... a feature I was thinking to work on.

Two birds (or more) with one stone...

Will take a look at it... ;-)

Thanks - it might even be as simple as tweaking something in the 'manifest' or background.js. Keeping settings in sync between different versions would be more of a pain, but it is possible.