In order to get the electron app to communicate with my Arduino board I uploaded the standard firmata to the board and then required
the JohnnyFive library which allows me to define all inputs/outputs as Javascript objects and even communicate with them in real time
from the terminal via REPL(ReadEvaluatePrint) function. You can find out more about JohnnyFive and Javscript for Robotics on this Nodebots page