webserial

2 Articles

Update Your Chinese Radio Without The Pain

August 13, 2023 by 37 Comments

The new hotness in cheap radios this year has been the Quansheng UV-K5, a Chinese handheld transceiver with significant RF abilities and easy modding. The amateur radio community have seized upon it with glee and already reverse-engineered much of the firmware, but flashing the thing has always required a minor effort. Now thanks to the work of [whosmatt], it can be flashed with little more than a web browser and a serial cable.

This feat was made possible through the magic of WebSerial, a handy feature that allows web applications to talk to connected hardware. We’ve seen it in action a few times in the world of badges, and as browser support for it has improved it’s now available through browsers on all the major platforms.

The web app allows tweaking of the Quansheng settings and will, no doubt, be capable of uploading that when fully open-source firmware is available. It should be of great interest well beyond the world of Chinese radios, though, because we’re guessing there are a lot of projects that could benefit from such a ubiquitous interface tool.

If you’d like to know more, WebSerial is something we’ve looked at in the past.

Header image: [Concretedog]

WebSerial: Browser Based Development For Your Boards And Electronic Badges

March 21, 2021 by 9 Comments

For years, one of the most accessible and simplest-to-implement methods of talking to a dev board has been to give it a serial port. Almost everything has serial in some form, so all that’s needed is to fire up a terminal. But even with that simplicity, there are still moments when the end user might find a terminal interface a little daunting. Think of a board aimed at kids for example, or an event badge which must be accessible to as many people as possible.

We’ve seen a very convenient solution to this problem in the form of WebUSB, but for devices without the appropriate USB hardware there’s WebSerial, an in-browser API for communicating with serial ports including USB-to-serial chips. [Tom Clement] argues that this could serve as the way forward for event badges. Best of all it can be a retro-fit to enable in-browser development for older badges or dev boards with a serial port.

The boards on which he demonstrates the technique are the series of event badges running the badge.team firmware platform including his own i-Pane from CampZone 2019 and going right back to the SHA 2017 badge, but there’s no reason why the same technique can’t be extended to other boards.

There’s a snag with all this though, sadly only browsers in the Chrome family support it at the time of writing, with no plans from Mozilla and apple, and silence from Microsoft. So things look likely to stay that way. It is however inevitable that in time there will be commercial products taking advantage of it via the use of cheap USB to serial chips, so perhaps the case to incorporate it will make itself.

Header: Mobius, Public domain.