Connect and Reconnect of Hardware

[nickstew]

Currently the software only connects on startup to the hardware. We should continue to attempt to connect and have some banner that shows that the hardware is disconnected.

[anwarhamr]

This is basically not possible w/o restarting the node process ie electron.
rwaldron/johnny-five#649
They are suggesting that we do this in a separate process... that will add a significant hit on performance and another layer of complexity to boot.
I've tried to null out the board and recreate it but that does not work. I'll think on this tonight...

[jonfen]

@nickstew @anwarhamr so ideally this is a change / pull request to https://github.com/node-serialport/node-serialport then?

[anwarhamr]

@jonfen Possibly. I am going to try and get an issue created with them create a git for them to have an example.
A couple questions:

• What board are you using in the box? I can't see it.
• Why are you using the firmata library?

[jonfen]

@anwarhamr we ship with the Arduino Uno Rev3. If firmata is performant, that means we don't have to update sketch files, just software for updates. This solves a support issue. One challenge currently with trying out other software packages is explaining how to "update the firmware".