Late june was held in Anglet (France) the ResCom Summer School 2019. A presentation about Large scale experimentation platforms including Equipex FIT was followed by a 2 hours tutorial on FIT IoT-LAB platform. 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.

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

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 FIT IoT-LAB boards.

The operating systems page of the website has been updated to provide information about boards supported by the different OSes, including Zephyr. You can also find more information about Zephyr support on the FIT IoT-LAB Wiki.

And finally, to help you get started with Zephyr on FIT IoT-LAB, we wrote a new tutorial that details how to setup your build environment, build and deploy a Zephyr firmware on the testbed.

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.

Discover this new feature by following our new getting started tutorial.

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.

Just follow the README on github to learn how to install and use it with the FIT IoT-LAB testbed.

We are very happy to announce the release of a new location for open nodes on the Lille site of IoT-LAB.

We’ve added Le Cube, a space for heterogeneous interoperability & compatibility

For now, we’ve deployed nodes that are capable of 802.15.4 in both 2.4 GHz and sub-GHz, nodes using BLE, and nodes using LoRa. They all coexist in a small vicinity:

• 5 m3 nodes
• 5 firefly nodes
• 5 st-lrwan1 nodes
• 5 microbit nodes
• 5 samr21 nodes

The panel of offered MCUs and radio chipsets is intended to grow (total available 64 gateways), and can include your own boards, just follow our documentation on the iot-lab-gateway repository to start, and we’ll be glad to physically plug them in LeCube.

We hope you will enjoy working with this new space.

We are very happy to announce the release of a new batch of 46 open nodes on the Saclay site of IoT-LAB.

With these new nodes, the possibilities already provided by IoT-LAB are even more extended:
– The are nodes from different vendors: NXP, Microchip, ST, Nordic, Phytec, etc
– The nodes provide different radios: 802.15.4, BLE, WiFi, Sub-GHz

The nodes with 802.15.4 radio are deployed in the same room in order to allow developers testing wireless connectivity between heterogeneous platforms. Nodes with BLE radios are deployed in another room and are quite close to each other.
For more details on the deployment, please have a look at the Saclay site deployment page.

We recall that adding support for new nodes can be done by anyone: just follow our documentation on the iot-lab-gateway repository.

We hope you will enjoy working with these new open nodes.

We are glad to announce the release of our new Web portal for IoT-LAB experiments submission.

The new Web portal covers everything from the previous site, with some new features.

What’s new:

• Faster dashboard with live experiments state
• Intuitive ergonomic UI for experiment submission
• Testbed status page with running experiments and nodes properties
• Account management with user profile

Additional features will be added in the upcoming months as we complete them.

The portal is built with the Vue.js framework and leverages a new version of IoT-LAB public REST API.

After the addition of SAMR21 and LoRa nodes we want to formally announce the
availability of new types of boards on some IoT-LAB sites, which will permit
a wider range of possibilities on the testbed.

– 9 Zolertia Firefly boards, featuring two radios (2.4 GHz 802.15.4 Zigbee and
sub-GHz), have been deployed on the Lille site. They are deployed throughout
the building and, depending on the firmware you flash, will enable heterogeneous
networking with co-located regular M3 nodes. A new tutorial demonstrating the short and
long range capabilities is available on the IoT-LAB website [1]

– 3 Arduino Zero boards with XBee shields have been deployed on the Saclay site.
They are close to the existing M3 and SAMR21 nodes and thus allow to test
802.15.4 (2.4GHz) interoperability between different types of radio. A new
tutorial showing the use of networking capabilities of RIOT on these boards is
also available on the IoT-LAB website [2]

If you have some hardware that you would like to see deployed on Iot-LAB, check
out this documentation [3] to implement the initial support and we will help
you to finalize the on site deployment.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to us on https://github.com/iot-lab/iot-lab/issues/
for any issue you might have with the new boards.
[1] https://www.iot-lab.info/tutorials/use-zolertia-firefly-nodes
[2] https://www.iot-lab.info/tutorials/use-arduino-zero-nodes
[3] https://github.com/iot-lab/iot-lab-gateway/blob/master/DEVELOPER.md

We are very proud to announce you the availability of 25 new LoRa/Sigfox nodes in FIT IoT-LAB. The nodes are ST B-L072Z-LRWAN1 boards with ST MEMS extension X-NUCLEO-IKS01A2 and are only available in Saclay site for the moment.

Please send a request by email to admin@iot-lab.info explaining your motivation and detailing your use case if you want to use them.

A new tutorial is written to guide you through your first steps using LoRaWAN with RIOT and TheThingsNetwork.

Other tutorials are also available on the IoT-LAB website.

We would like to inform you about tools updates we made on the IoT-LAB SSH frontends.

GNU Toolchain for ARM

Version 7.2 of the GNU Toolchain for ARM is now installed in /opt/gcc-arm-none-eabi-7-2017-q4-major in addition to the actual one, version 4.9, which is still used by default. To know more on how to use it or set it as the default version, see the IoT-LAB wiki.

IoT-LAB CLI Tools

For a better user experience, we released a new version of IoT-LAB command-line tools (v2.5.3). It mainly consists in renaming, adding a common prefix to the different commands.

Thus now you should use:

• iotlab-experiment (experiment-cli)
• iotlab-node (node-cli)
• iotlab-profile (profile-cli)
• iotlab-auth (auth-cli)
• iotlab-robot (robot-cli)
• iotlab-ssh (open-a8-cli)

All legacy names are always available to ensure compatibility with old scripts and tools. A deprecated message is printed when using legacy commands.
Of course you are encouraged to update.

We are pleased to announce that the public IPv6 service on the FIT IoT-LAB testbed as been extended with the Paris site.

As a reminder, five sites implement now this service:

• Grenoble
• Lille
• Paris
• Saclay
• Strasbourg

You can find more details about M3/A8 nodes global IPv6 subnetting by following this tutorial.

Moreover, on the tutorials page, you will find some tutorials to learn how to use public IPv6 addresses with M3/A8 nodes with Contiki or RIOT.