End of the first session of the MOOC

01 Jun 2020

As the first session of MOOC is coming to an end, it’s time to share some key figures with you:

  • 6,757 participants in 110 countries (55% in France)
  • 491 participants obtained a certificate of course completion
  • 1,550 participants created a FIT IoT-LAB account
  • 7,715 Python notebooks (i.e. practical work) were completed, an average of 12 per user.
  • 87% are men, 13% are women.
  • 3% are under 30, 67% are [31-59], 11% are over 60 years old
  • 33% of you are employed in a company, nearly 13% are teachers and 12% are students.
  • your knowledge of IoT, 44% consider themselves as beginners, 49% as intermediate and 8% as advanced

Thank you all for your participation and feedback. The pedagogical team had a great pleasure in helping you and answering your questions throughout the 9 weeks of the course.

The second session is scheduled for the beginning of next year with new features such as a course and practical activities on LoRa long range radio technology.

So stay tuned !!

MOOC Internet of Things with Microcontrollers: a hands-on course

30 Mar 2020

Discover, program and experience the IoT through theory & activities using RIOT and the FIT IoT-LAB testbed.

This online course, available in english or french, provides an introduction to the IoT and hands-on experience in programming connected objects. It offers theoretical inputs and practical activities using the RIOT OS and the FIT IoT-LAB testbed. Participating in this course does not require any specific hardware or software installation.

The course is accessible to any developer, engineer, student or maker who has programming bases (C and/or Python or Bash) and prior knowledge of the Linux system (command lines). It is organized in 5 parts (modules) which allow to acquire knowledge on the hardware, software and communications protocols commonly used in IoT. You will progressively put your theoretical learnings into practice by remotely programming the microcontrollers of the FIT IoT-LAB testbed. The course also includes a module dedicated to securing connected objects.

Each participant will be able to :

  • remotely access the FIT IoT-LAB testbed from his or her computer, free of charge and without prior software installation,
  • discover IoT standards and test the RIOT operating system with the help of their designers and contributors,
  • develop, test and reuse your own IoT applications on other experimental platforms.

Teachers

The educational content was developed by engineers, researchers and teachers from CNRS, Hauts-de-France Polytechnic University and Inria.

Practical information

The MOOC is produced by Inria Learning Lab and runs on the FUN-mooc platform. Follow course news on Twitter: #MoocIoT

ResCom Summer School 2019

26 Jun 2019

Late june was held in Anglet (France) the ResCom Summer School 2019.

A presentation about Large scale experimentation platforms including FIT Equipex was followed by a 2 hours tutorial on FIT IoT-LAB. It was designed for new attendees in order to bootstrap their first experiment on FIT Equipex platforms. It also was the opportunity to learn how to experiment trough IoT-LAB testbed.

  • SlidesA presentation on FIT IoT-LAB facilities was given in introduction by Guillaume Schreiner
  • Tutorial

Zephyr operating system support

13 Jun 2019

We are happy to announce that FIT IoT-LAB now also provides support for the Zephyr operating system.

The version supported on the tested is the LTS 1.14.0 release from April 2019. The Zephyr SDK is also deployed on every SSH frontend to allow easy builds of Zephyr firmwares for supported boards.

The Zephyr page provides information about boards supported boards and about Zephyr support on the testbed.

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:

  • The access to the serial port is similar to the netcat access on port 20000 from the SSH frontends: only one TCP connection at a time is possible. This means that you cannot use the web terminal if a TCP connection is already opened using netcat. And vice-versa.
  • The serial stream transport uses a websocket connection between the browser and the FIT IoT-LAB web server. For performance reasons, only 2 websocket connections on a single node are allowed at a time and 10 websocket connections per site per user in total are allowed.

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.