New web terminal available on the testbed webportal and websocket CLI tools

19 Mar 2019

We would like to inform you about new features available that simplify the access to the serial port of FIT IoT-LAB nodes.

Direct access via the testbed webportal

It is now possible to access the serial port of all nodes but the A8 from the experiment details page on the testbed webportal.
Each node in an experiment now provides a terminal icon in the list of supported actions: just click on it and a web terminal pops up with direct access to the serial port of the node.

This makes the user experience as simple as possible when using FIT IoT-LAB via the testbed webportal!

There are things to take into account though:

This new feature is used in The first experiment for beginners in video of the Learn page.

New websocket CLI Tools

The access to the node serial port via websockets also makes it possible to aggregate serial input/output of nodes from different sites on a single computer. To do this, we released a new CLI tool: the ws-cli-tools.
It is open source, compatible with Python 2 and Python 3 and available on PyPI.

See the Websocket client documentation to learn how to install and use it with the FIT IoT-LAB testbed.