Build a Node.js app with Formant functionality

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This page assumes knowledge of JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, and Playwright. For information and documentation on the Playwright package, see the Playwright website: Playwright.

You can use Node.js to build a JavaScript application which programmatically opens a teleoperation connection to a Formant device without using a browser-based UI.

On our GitHub page, you can find an example which establishes a teleoperation connection to a Formant device and reports the ping between the server running the program and the device: GitHub: node-data-sdk.

When using this example, you can modify the Data SDK functionality in /src/web/user.js. At runtime, this script is injected into the index page. index.html is then served to a headless web browser via Playwright. The presence of this headless web browser gives the app access to the WebRTC API, which Formant uses to create a teleoperation connection to a device.

Logs from the web browser are parsed in the page.on('console', (message)) structure and reported in the terminal. Functions from user.js can be called in Node.js using the page.evaluate() function.