Has anyone had any experience or can share ideas on how potentially I could read data from a physical device?
My aim is to connect a serial device over com port which generates ZPL label data. I need to upload this to a Wappler PHP web app. I’ve already built the logic to convert the ZPL data into human readable data, but just struggling on how I can upload this data with a physical device connected to a PC with web browser.
I use small boards that are added to our devices to connect to the internet.
Google search: internet of things
We use https://www.thinger.io to communicate to the devices and then I use an API call from wappler to bring the data over to the website.
I am not at all familiar with the machine-web interfacing form the developer's perspective, but I have seen a live implementation of it using browser extensions.
This limits the extensibility of the platforms where the web app can work, but since we are talking about specific hardware, I don't think it is a limitation.
I am not sure how you are transferring or reading data from the device to the PC, but if you have that part figured out, next would be figuring out on building an extension which would give that data to your web app. Another part of it would be to configure reading the data sent by installed extension.
So, like I said in the beginning I don't really know how to build it out, but I have seen similar thing working.
I have no idea about thinger either. @baub novice question: using this service means the hardware device has to have capabilities to connect to internet on its own, right?
Well not necessarily. You can purchase a small circuit board, thinger has their own board or raspberry pi or arduno all have boards that can connect to the internet. The raspberry pi costs between 35-45 dollars and is basically a very small computer actually. So then you just attach your device to the board and then it will talk to internet and then connect to it through wappler API. Its actually a lot easier than you would think.
Thinger has a free version that will allow a limited number of devices. It was a bit slow sometimes, so we ended up purchasing our own virutal server on AWS. It works very well, also they posted a list to their API calls, so you can bascially control everything through the wappler API.