- Chrome.exe is part of the Chromium open-source browser project. It is different than Google Chrome browser although it uses the same executable name. The vendor for the Chromium will contain 'The Chromium Authors' and the product will contain 'Chromium'. The path for the Chromium chrome.exe will usually contain the word Chromium or ChromePlus.
- Geckofx and Webkit.net were both promising at first, but they didn't keep up to date with Firefox and Chrome respectively while as Internet Explorer improved, so did the Webbrowser control, though it behaves like IE7 by default regardless of what IE version you have but that can be fixed by going into the registry and change it to IE9 allowing.
- Microsoft Webbrowser Control
- Vb Webbrowser Control
- Net Webbrowser Control Chrome Settings
- C# Webbrowser Control
Turn on the app, hover over the element you don't want to see, hold the 'ctrl' key and right click! Version 1.3 Simplified interface. Use the extension icon to enable or disable. Once enabled: hold. Chrome based Browser Engine for.NET. EO.WebBrowser is a web browser engine based on Google's Chromium project but with native.NET programming interface - don't worry, it's not a wrapper around the Chrome browser installed on your machine. In fact EO.WebBrowser has the whole browser engine embedded inside a single.NET DLL.
Here’s how to use the Web Bluetooth API and balena to control Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices remotely from a browser. This guide shows you how to build a simple LED setup that you can switch on and off from a web browser. We’ll also dive into how this works and how it can drive other awesome ideas.
In this article, we will demonstrate how to use bleno, a Node.js library, to implement Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) peripherals on a balenaOS-powered device and use a web app to communicate with it from a browser.
Note: This piece is an optimized version of a previous exploration of balenaBLE published in October 2019. We've improved it for usability and granular steps that our users enjoy and appreciate.
Contents
Introduction
Walkthrough
How it works
Introduction
For the purpose of our demo, we are going to use Bluetooth to control an LED connected to a Raspberry Pi (our peripheral device) from the balenaBLE web app (on our central device, e.g. your laptop). A physical push button is also attached to the Raspberry Pi and allows toggling the LED on and off. You can see this data collection and notification within the Web Bluetooth application when the physical button is pressed.
The Raspberry Pi will be configured as a peripheral device called
balenaBLE
with the following services and characteristics:Hardware required
- A balenaOS supported device with BLE e.g Raspberry Pi 3A+/3B/3B+/Zero W/4B
- An SD card
- Power supply
- LED
- Resistor (above 50 Ohms, advisable to include for long test sessions)
- A computer, laptop, or Android smartphone with BLE running the latest Chrome web browser
- A push button
- Breadboard to add ease to this test build (optional)
Software required
- balenaEtcher to write balenaOS to SD card
- A free balenaCloud account to set up and manage the Pi
- The balena-web-ble project from Github
- Download and install balena CLI tools, which allows you to install the project code on your device
Walkthrough
Set up the balena device
With all of your hardware and software prepared, let’s start setting up the device.
If you don’t have one already, sign up for a free balenaCloud account. You can use single sign-on (SSO) via Google and GitHub to get going quickly.
Create a balenaCloud application
Add an application by clicking the ‘Create Application’ button. Select the correct device type for the device you’re using, and then choose ‘Starter’ as the application type. Select ‘Create New Application’ and you’ll now have a new balenaCloud application appear on the dashboard.
Note: The ‘Starter’ application provides you with all of the features of the microservices application, up to ten free devices.
You’ll see the dashboard for your newly created application, where you can move on to the next step and add your device. You’ll want to choose a name you’ll stick with throughout the project as you’ll need this name to identify the device to push code to later.
Add a device and download the balenaOS disk image from the dashboard
Add a device within your new application by clicking the 'add device' button. Make sure to specify your device type, which is important that it matches the device you’re using so you download the proper OS. If you plan on connecting to a wireless network, you can set your WiFI SSID and passphrase during this step, too.
Note: The following GIF walks through these steps and uses a Raspberry Pi 3 as an example. Be sure to choose the actual device you’re using for your project!
This process creates a customized image configured for your application and device type and includes your network settings if you specified them.
For new users, we recommend using a development image, as it permits a number of testing and troubleshooting features to help. Get more details on the differences between development and production images in our documentation.
For more experienced users, go ahead and deploy the production image straight away.
Flash your SD card with the balenaOS disk image and boot the device
Once the OS download completes, you can use balenaEtcher, a free open-source flashing tool, to flash the OS onto the SD card. Once the flashing is complete, insert the SD card to the device and connect its power supply.
After a few seconds, it should connect to the internet and show up on the balenaCloud dashboard.
Troubleshooting your device
Devices typically show up on the dashboard once booted and after a few minutes. If your device still hasn't shown up on your dashboard after a few minutes, something might be wrong. Use this extensive troubleshooting guide in the documentation or come on over to the forums where we’ll be able to help out.
Deploy the project code
Once the device is connected and showing in the dashboard, it is time to deploy the application that will create a BLE peripheral device.
Get the balenaBLE project from this GitHub repo, either by downloading the .zip or using
git clone <url>
.Push the project code to your device with balena-cli
Using the above-mentioned balenaCLI, run the command
balena push <appName>
where <appName>
is the name of the application you created within the balenaCloud dashboard earlier. For this example project, we will use the balena push web-ble
command.If all went well you’ll see the balena unicorn mascot and the code you’ve just pushed will automatically be distributed to the devices in your application.
You should also see the
You should also see the
main
service running on the dashboard:Set up the device
Connect the LED and pushbutton as follows:
By default, the project uses GPIO 17 for the LED and GPIO 4 for the pushbutton. If you want to use a different pin, you can configure the
LED_PIN
and BTN_PIN
environment variables in the dashboard. For example, if you want to use GPIO 27 for the LED instead:Note: After configuring the environment variable, the main service will be restarted.
Load the Web Bluetooth App
The web app to control the Bluetooth peripheral device can be accessed here. We’ve hosted a copy of the application for you to test with, but you can download the code and host it yourself too. Load the web app on your laptop or android device in the Chrome browser.
Turn on Bluetooth on your smartphone or laptop. Click on the “Connect” button which will trigger device scanning. After connecting, you can see the device’s CPU information and will be able to toggle the LED on or off.
You can also see the device logs in the dashboard as the light is toggled.
You can also use the pushbutton to control the LED. The Web Bluetooth application will be notified and reflect the actual state of the LED on the UI.
The Web Bluetooth API is available in secure contexts only in the web browser. For development purposes, the Web Bluetooth is available from the
localhost
. The web app here has been deployed on Github Pages which provides HTTPS access by default.How it works
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), formerly known as Bluetooth Smart, is a subset of the classic Bluetooth specification designed to provide communication with low power consumption. It is helpful to understand some specific concepts and terminology when developing BLE applications.
Web BLE lets you imagine the possibilities
Developing bluetooth controlled projects traditionally means writing platform specific native applications and deploying it to an app store for distribution (which approval processes can take a while). With Web BLE, you can simply provide a URL to load your web app and it just works from your browser. You could create web-based apps that read data from heart-rate monitors, control a mood lamp, check your device’s battery level, or, maybe even fly a drone (!), all directly from your browser.
Generic Access Profile (GAP)
The GAP defines how BLE devices communicate with other BLE-enabled devices. In the context of a BLE network, a device can be:
- A peripheral device: these are typically low power and resource-constrained devices that advertise themselves and wait for a central device to connect to them. The Raspberry Pi acts as a peripheral device in this project.
- A central device: these are typically smartphones or powerful devices that initiate a connection with peripheral BLE devices. For our demo, a laptop or an android smartphone with the latest Chrome web browser will act as the central device. The Web Bluetooth application loaded through the browser initiates a connection with the Raspberry Pi.
A peripheral device can connect to only a single central device at a time. Once a connection has been established, peripheral devices stop advertising themselves. A central device, on the other hand, can connect to several peripheral devices and can relay messages among peripheral devices.
Generic Attribute Profile (GATT)
Once BLE devices have established a connection, the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) dictates how data is exchanged over the connection. Devices can adopt different roles:
- GATT Server: These are typically peripheral devices that have attributes that the client can make requests to.
- GATT Client: Send requests to the GATT server. They can read or write to attributes on the server.
Services
A GATT server offers one or more services. Some services can be grouped together into profiles. There are several predefined profiles and services by the Bluetooth SIG. For example, the Blood Pressure Profile(https://www.bluetooth.org/docman/handlers/downloaddoc.ashx?doc_id=457086) contains the Blood Pressure Service and the Device Information Service.
Each service is identified by a Universally Unique Identifier (UUID). For officially adopted BLE Services(https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/gatt/services/), the UUID is 16-bit, while custom services are 128-bit. A service like Online UUID Generator(https://www.uuidgenerator.net/) can be used to generate custom UUIDs.
Characteristics
Services can contain one or more characteristics. They are also identified by either 16-bit or 128-bit UUIDs. A Characteristic has a value, which is an array of bytes and a collection of Descriptors.
Depending on the properties of the Characteristic, a GATT Client can read or write its value, or register to be notified when the value changes. A GATT Descriptor provides further information about a Characteristic’s value.
Going Further
This project uses the bleno library to create a BLE peripheral device. Feel free to explore the API and experiment with other BLE properties and characteristics to make your own custom BLE peripheral device.
You can then customize the web app accordingly to suit your use case. The relevant files are
index.html
and ble-client.js
in the project. For instance, imagine replacing the LED with a relay to manage switching devices on and off. Like we said previously, the possibilities are endless. If you do make something cool, please do let us know.If you decide to test out this project or build your own, we’d love to hear how it went. Similarly, if you get stuck or have any questions, let us know in our forums, on Twitter @balenaio, on Instagram @balenaio or on Facebook.
In this article, we show how to open and control the Chrome web browser in Windowsusing the Selenium Module in Python.
Using certain tools within the Selenium module in Python, we can open and control the Chrome web browser through Python code.
Instead of the normal, conventional way of clicking the Chrome web browser and manually entering in a URL to get to a web page, we can achieve all of this through Python code.
In this article, we show how to install selenium and ChromeDriver so that you can make use of this functionality.
So the first thing you need to do is install the selenium module.
This can be done in the windows command prompt using the line below.
When running a pip command, make sure that you're within the Scripts directory of Python.
It will tell you then if it has successfully installed.
You can check if it is installed by opening your Python software and typing in, import selenium
If there is no error message, then the selenium module is installed on your PC.
The next thing we must do is install the ChromeDriver for our Windows PC.
The ChromeDriver software allows us to interact with the Google Chrome web browser.
So let's now go over how to install the ChromeDriver software.
The page that contains all of the different downloads for the ChromeDriver softwares is shown at the following link: ChromeDriver Downloads.
The version of the ChromeDriver that you want to install should be compatible with the type of Chrome browser that you currently have.
If you download a ChromeDriver version that isn't compatible with the Chrome browser that you have, the software will not work.
You can find out the version of Chrome that you have by opening up the browser and selecting 'Help'and then 'About Google Chrome'
The version you have will be listed on that page.
An important point is that there is only one version for Windows that will work on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems. You'll notice that when you look through the ChromeDriver Downloads page, for windows downloads, you always see the number 32. You may think that only 32-bit windows operating systems are supported. However, this is not the case. I have tested it on 64-bit windows operating systems, and it has worked. So both versions are supported.
Once you have downloaded this file and extracted it (being that it is a compressed file), then the next thing you have to do is add it to the Windows Path environment variable. This allows Windows to be able to locate the executable file of the program to run it. If you don't add it a path environment variable for it, the Windows operating system wouldn't know where the executable file is to run the program.
To add a path environment variable for the program, go to the Windows search bar at the bottom and type in, Edit Environment Variables.
The following should now be shown on your screen.
To edit path environment variables, click on 'Path' and click the 'Edit' button.
The following should now be shown on your screen.
Now that you're on this Screen, click 'Add' to put in another path variable. Add the complete path to the folder which contains the executable ChromeDriver program. You're not specifying the path to the executable file, but tto the folder that contains the executable file.
Once you've clicked 'Ok' twice, there should be a path environment variable to the ChromeDriver software on your Windows PC.
To test this out, open the Command Prompt on your Windows PC, and type in chromedriver.
If you see the following below, this means that the ChromeDriver software on your PC is up and running.
Once you've reached this point, then you can now open your Python software.
We will write a basic program using the Selenium module to open the Chrome web browser and go to amazon.com website.
This is shown in the code below.
The first thing we have to do is import webdriver from the selenium module. This allows us to work with web browers; in this case, Chrome.
We then create a variable, browser, which we set equal to, webdriver.Chrome(). This allows us to make a connection to the Chrome browser.
Microsoft Webbrowser Control
Next we use the get() function to retrieve the amazon.com website.
Vb Webbrowser Control
Know that all of this is done by the webdriver in Python code. We do not click the Chrome icon manually to open it up or manually enter in the URL. All of this is done through the webdriver in the Python code.
Net Webbrowser Control Chrome Settings
So this is how we can open and control the Chrome web browser in Windows using the selenium module in Python.
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