Try ST evaluation boards remotely!

[MikeGrovety]

Hi all!

I'm an embedded developer with 15+ years of experience. And now I am working on a project that seems to be useful for developers like me. But there is a great lack of feedback. I'm asking for help from the professional community.

What is it: a web service for remote access to evaluation boards of different manufacturers (ST boards are now available). The idea is that the user will not have to pay money or wait to try any evaluation board - just go to the web site, select the desired board and use it:

• connect from your locally installed IDE (Eclipse, Keil, IAR)
• develop the firmware, flash it, debug it (including step by step tracing, breakpoints - everything as usual)
• board power management
• see what's happening via your browser (live-video of the board - it’s LCD, diodes, etc.)
• work with UART (and many other interfaces are coming)

Your source codes remain with you, only the binary data is transmitted to the server, and between sessions, the default firmware is flashed on the board.

There are many ideas that can still be screwed on, but it seems better to act not blindly, but based on feedback from the professionals. Would you like to share your ideas? Let's do a really useful thing for all embedded developers.

If you are ready to try it and then share your opinion - send me a private message and I’ll send you a URL, login, and password.

P.S. Please also find our “promo�? PDF attached

[waclawek.jan]

Yeah I like the idea. However, with any new company, the first thing is that I go to Contacts and look for address. Trust building, you know.

Who you are? Where are you from?

JW

[MikeGrovety]

We are doing the project under Grovety company (USA), but I personally am a developer from Russia

[Pavel A.]

What if a smart remote user bricks your board? =)

This could be a useful project for a school lab, accessible from internal school network.

What about "transfer binaries only"... Beginners often have issues with setting up the development environment. Would be great if your project could provide something like the mbed online compiler, or maybe Eclipse Che. Of course this is too far away from your current idea.

-- pa

[MikeGrovety]

There may be that kind of use case. We'll be grateful if you'll try to do it and give us feedback)

> What about "transfer binaries only"

It's possible. We have a video guide on how to do it. Now we are using JLINK adapter. As a result, you can use J-Flash Lite utility from  J-Link Software and Documentation Pack for download binaries to MCU.

[waclawek.jan]

> Would be great if your project could provide something like the mbed online compiler, or maybe Eclipse Che. Of course this is too far away from your current idea.

Actually, exactly complementing... mbed and kin offers a "cloud" compiler to generate binary for your local device; Grovety offers remote device to run code built at you locally. It shouldn't be hard to use both - build binary on mbed and then run it in Grovety's environment.

> We are doing the project under Grovety company (USA), but I personally am a developer from Russia

Thanks for that info. I'm from Slovakia so I understand Russian. From what I've read, you (or your parent or sister company) already offer this remote hardware control/probing system as a product, so this is not an entirely new thing. (And it's not a surprising idea: we've contemplated to homebrew something similar in the past to facilitate work from home, but then dropped the idea for... mostly lack of time and energy, but also there was always too much interaction with hardware, never just pure software). Nevertheless, it's an impressive work.

And it makes perfectly sense to offer remote access to devboards as a service - working on a new idea is best done by benchmarking proof-of-concept sketches, and while the EVAL boards and similar are perfect for the task, they are also somewhat pricey and their complexity is sometimes overwhelming. So, would I be in position to try something new, I would be inclined to "borrow" such a board even if remotely; especially if it comes with proven working examples.

It also makes perfectly sense to use it simultaneously as a demonstrator for the remote-control solution itself. I'm sure you'd offer also related consulting, and it also makes perfect sense.

So, while I am not interested at the moment to try it, I would also suggest you to make the offer more straighforward. Maybe tell us which devboard(s) is/are available. Maybe you could offer an anonymous "preview", perhaps severely limited e.g. running only the default firmware you've mentioned, as a taster. And certainly make a video, demonstrating how a user would approach your system.

JW

[Pavel A.]

Thanks Jan for the comment.

If I understand correctly, this project is based on a REDD box, which is both a board hardware interface and remote access host with video.

Nice. Again, I don't see this as a "standalone" publicly accessible project. Even if you throw in something hot like ML, drones and robotics, in addition to DSP.

ST and board making companies could be interested in this to set up private remote evaluation labs for their customers.

Especially, these days. Good luck!

-- pa

[MikeGrovety]

Thank you for your wishes! You're quite right - All-HW is a logical continuation of a REDD project, but the target is different.

[waclawek.jan]

The service at https://all-hw.com/ appears to work against a simple registration.

There is a selection of STM32 boards available.

Haven't tested with a real project yet, just looking around there.

JW