Detect Puck button press on external device, ideally within node script

Hey all,

Brand new to Puck.js and enjoying playing around with it so far.

I'm trying to put a simple node script together that can detect the Puck's button press so I can run a couple of things on each press. I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out where to start, however.

I'm guessing that the best way to do this would be over a Bluetooth connection, but I'm having trouble finding the relevant docs or any examples to help get this started.

If anyone's got any advice it would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

Hi,

There are a few ways to go from Puck.js to Node.js. The easy one is just to use the HID support to get it to act like a key on the keyboard is physically pressed and detect that - but I think you might have tried that already?

The other nice method is to use advertising - Puck.js will send advertising data with information about the button press, and you just need to receive that.

@knolleary posted up his code for that here that's really nice: http://forum.espruino.com/conversations/298279/#13404185

And I'd advise that you try using that to get started - it provides a really useful way to send arbitrary data.

Hey again Gordon,

That looks perfect, I'll give it a try!

After your advice on my GitHub issue yesterday I did look into using Puck.js as a HID and that seemed like it could work well, but the advertising example looks like a cleaner way to approach it to me.

If it works out I'll throw together a short blog post on it, as I spent a good few hours searching for examples on how others had approached this problem and couldn't find anything that didn't involve Node-RED.

Thanks again for taking the time!