RPi / Arm Compile / Installation doc please

[jet-leeroy]

📚 Documentation

Trying to get serialport running for ARM is not clearly documented / or lacking detail. Please can we have a proper step by step from first node install to running example.js / hello.js example. Have spent days trying to get serialport running with node v14.5.0 on Arm7, and always get version mismatch problems. Ultimately I downgraded my project to node 10.19 which seemed to work, but all manner of rebuilds with all number of flags completely failed to bring serialport up to usable with 14.5

Have you read the Contributing Guidelines on docs?

Yes

[reconbot]

If your RPI is setup for serial than it shouldn't be any different than building on any other system. What is the error exactly?

[mikelyndersOKCC]

Hi there, I had no problems installing the latest serialport on my brand new RPi4 with latest nodejs and and Raspberry Pi OS. Maybe try upgrading one or all?

[email protected] Node.js v14.11.0 Linux (Raspberry Pi 4) Raspberry Pi OS August 2020

[LongLiveCHIEF]

@jet-leeroy what OS are you using. Is python2 on the PATH for the user running the install?

[jet-leeroy]

Hey

Sorry, have been away due to work and covid.

The issue is not that it doesn't work, the issue is the documentation around which versions work with which platforms is light.

I am using a rpi 2 with Ubuntu. First time build spat up a while bunch of errors probably due to the compiled C native binary being used in the background for the actual port interface. Eventually dropping my node version to 12 and rebuilding got it to work, but trying to start with node 14 was a bust. Additionally I had a few build options I needed to use that took a lot of googling.. I recall some kind of allow unsafe flag I needed to use at one point.

I'm not saying it doesn't work, I am not a node js dev, my background is dotnet, so. It took a lot of google to get a a hello world going so I could move forward.I'm just saying the documentation to get a hello world up on rpi could've been better. Not everyone is a node dev.

Justin

On Sat, 26 Sep 2020, 17:22 Brian Vanderbusch, [email protected] wrote:

@jet-leeroy https://github.com/jet-leeroy what OS are you using. Is python2 on the PATH for the user running the install?

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[LongLiveCHIEF]

I don't even think this is a node dev thing, I think it's a sysadmin thing.

I read https://serialport.io/docs/guide-installation#compilation-problems early on, and that's how I figured it out. I've had many, many years as both a developer and sysadmin, so I knew how to interpret those instructions to Ubuntu on the RPi (installed build-essential and python2, then ran update-alternatives so python2 was the default).

With python 2 being no longer installed in many distros by default, including windows, I agree it may be time to tweak the docs a bit.

node-gyp also now states that python 3.8 is supported (looks like it was added back in March), although I haven't tested it personally. Maybe instead of this being a documentation issue specific to RPi, it's a documentation issue to update compilation problems document to reflect modern OS/toolchain states?

[reconbot]

PRs welcome 🙏

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed in a week no further activity occurs. Feel free continue the discussion or ask for a never-stale label to keep it open. If this is a support issue, consider sharing it on stack overflow to get more eyes on your problem.

[LongLiveCHIEF]

go away stale bot

[GazHank]

The docs have been updated to reflect that Python 3 is now required. Are there any other updates to the docs required to address this?

[LongLiveCHIEF]

iirc the problem was that python 2 was required. Haven't tested this in a year though, but I can try again in the next day or two.