Managing multiple sensors with OpenTestbed¶

OpenTestbed allows you to manage multiple sensors, spread over multiple devices via an MQTT-server. It was initially developed at Inria, and has subsequently been adapted for use on w-iLab.1 .

It supports:

automatic discovery of all available sensor motes;
flashing a firmware (from a URL or from a file);
sending serial data to one or more motes simultaneously;
listening to the serial data sent by the motes.

OpenTestbed can be controlled either by directly sending messages on the MQTT-bus, using Inria’s WebGUI or imec’s CLI.

Installation¶

Installation with ESpec¶

An ESpec has been developed to deploy OpenTestbed on one or more nodes. It can be obtained from the espec_minimal branch of OpenTestbed .

To use it:

Reserve the sensor nodes you want to use
Adapt the RSpec located in deployment/otb.rspec to refer to your reserved sensor nodes. Make sure that <jfed:ansible_group name="sensor"/> is mentioned under <node>.
Once your reservation has started, swap in the resources with the ESpec. In jFed: click Open ESpec, select the folder with your adapted ESpec and start the experiment.
Wait for the resources to be swapped in, and the software to be installed via Ansible.

Manual installation¶

When manually installing the OpenTestbed-software, you must deploy at least 2 components:

An MQTT-server for brokering all OpenTestbed-messages (for example: Eclipse Mosquitto);
The otbox-software on each sensor-enabled server;
Optional: A node-red dashboard which provides a WebGUI to control your OpenTestbed instance

You can manually deploy the OpenTestbed otbox-software by:

Download or Clone the OpenTestbed repository on each server you want to add to your OpenTestbed-instance
Install the Python-requirements with pip install -r install/requirements.txt . Please note that most other files in the install/-folder are specific for the Inria-setup, and should be disregarded.

Run the otbox.py-script as follows:

python otbox.py --testbed wilab --broker <ip-or-dns-name-of-mqtt-server>

Using OpenTestbed¶

OpenTestbed is controlled by MQTT-messages. These are defined in the README.md of the OpenTestbed-repo.

You can implement these messages directly into your software, or you can use the CLI or WebGUI described in the sections below.

Using OpenTestbed via the CLI¶

imec developed a simple CLI to send OpenTestbed-commands and receive the responses. It is available as cli.py.

$ python cli.py
Usage: cli.py [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  changelocation     Change location of otbox
  discovermotes      Discover motes connected to otboxes
  echo               Simple echo command
  listenserial       Listen to the output of mote with the given EUI64
  program-from-file  Flash firmware from local file
  program-from-url   Flash firmware from URL
  status             Request status of otboxes
  tomoteserialbytes  Send data to serial port of mote

All commands require the testbed and broker-address to be specified, otherwise it will default to the Inria-testbed. This can be done either by passing them as options or as environment variables.

Important

For use in w-iLab.1 the testbed argument always must be wilab

As arguments:

-t or –testbed for the testbed. This must always be `wilab` for usage in w-iLab.1.

-b or –broker for the broker IP or DNS name.

As environment variables:

export OTB_TESTBED="wilab"

export OTB_BROKER="<ip-or-dns-name-of-mqtt-broker>"

All commands of cli.py will keep listening for replies until CTRL+C is pressed.

Example:

$ export OTB_BROKER="server.otb.wall2-ilabt-iminds-be.wall2.ilabt.iminds.be"
$ export OTB_TESTBED="wilab"
$ python cli.py --help
  Usage: cli.py [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Options:
    -t, --testbed [iotlab|opentestbed|wilab]
                                    [required]
    -b, --broker TEXT               The MQTT broker address  [required]
    -v, --verbose                   Increase verbosity
    --help                          Show this message and exit.

  Commands:
    changelocation     Change location of otbox
    discovermotes      Discover motes connected to otboxes
    echo               Simple echo command
    listenserial       Listen to the output of mote with the given EUI64
    program-from-file  Flash firmware from local file
    program-from-url   Flash firmware from URL
    status             Request status of otboxes
    tomoteserialbytes  Send data to serial port of mote

$ python cli.py echo "Hello World!"
b    sensor2: {u'token': u'2b4h7g3mn400', u'payload': u'Hello World!'}
b    sensor1: {u'token': u'2b4h7g3mn400', u'payload': u'Hello World!'}
^C

$ python cli.py discovermotes
b    sensor2: {u'motes': [{u'firmware_description': u'FIRMWARE_EUI64_RETRIEVAL',
u'bootload_success': False, u'serialport': u'/dev/ttyUSB0'},
{u'firmware_description': u'FIRMWARE_EUI64_RETRIEVAL',
u'EUI64': u'00-12-4b-00-09-df-2c-0f', u'bootload_success': True, u'serialport': u'/dev/ttyUSB1'}]}
b    sensor1: {u'motes': [{u'firmware_description': u'FIRMWARE_EUI64_RETRIEVAL',
u'bootload_success': False, u'serialport': u'/dev/ttyUSB0'},
{u'firmware_description': u'FIRMWARE_EUI64_RETRIEVAL',
u'EUI64': u'00-12-4b-00-09-df-8e-af', u'bootload_success': True, u'serialport': u'/dev/ttyUSB1'}]}
^C

To upload a firmware to the motes, use the program-from-file command. Every sensor will respond with its unique EUI64-identifier, and the result:

$ python cli.py program-from-file ~/contiki-ng/examples/hello-world/build/zoul/remote-revb/hello-world.hex
m 00-12-4b-00-09-df-90-95: True
m 00-12-4b-00-09-df-2c-2c: True
m 00-12-4b-00-10-03-56-2f: True
m 00-12-4b-00-10-03-54-44: True

To listen to the serial output of a mote, use listenserial, which expects the EUI64-identifier of the mote which serial output you want to follow:

$ python /opt/opentestbed/cli.py listenserial 00-12-4b-00-09-df-90-95
Hello, world
Hello, world
Hello, world
^C

Using OpenTestbed via the WebGUI¶

The WebGUI is available on port 80 of the server-node. The dashboard shows you how many messages are being sent, which boxes (=servers) and motes (by EUI64-address) are sending messages, and what the topics of these messages are.

To change the firmware go to ‘reprogram’ in the menu. You can select the mote from a dropdown-list, and must provide the hex-file with your firmware as an URL.

Troubleshooting¶

When the upload to a sensor fails, you can use the following files on the sensor-node to diagnose the problem:

/opt/opentestbed/log_ttyUSB0.txt contains the output of the latest flash-command
The otbox-std[out,err]---supervisor-[XXXXXX].log files in /var/log/supervisor/