Notecard for Skylo Starter Kit - Remote access to USB via WiFi

Hardware Notecard for Skylo
1

This is a bit convoluted. I have the Starter Kit and want to try NTN. The card needs to be out on the balcony to see the sky (I’m in the office) and I a) just want to use browser USB to connect for testing but b) don’t want to run a long USB cable back indoors. I have actually managed to connect the notecard to a RPi Zero 2 W (all running self-contained on a battery - on the balcony) such that the USB is made available over WiFi at x.x.x.x:2000. And on a PC inside the office (on the same subnet) I have created a virtual COM20 which points to x.x.x.x:2000.

Amazingly this works and if I use putty to talk serial to COM20 at 115200 I can issue commands to the notecard and get the json messages back. However, the notecard quickstart "Connect a Notecard" does not give me an option (that I can see) to connect to COM20. Is there a way to do this? If I connect locally to the notecard it obviously pops up as a COMxx device and I can connect.

It’s clear that in some sense COM20 is ok - putty can talk to it!

I know it’s a mad solution but I have no way of running a long cable out to the balcony and even if I could I am sure the voltage drop would upset the notecard!

I suppose one question is whether quickstart’s port chooser filters by USB vendor ID, and whether there’s a way to bypass the filter for non-USB serial ports.

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Hi @patmolloy,

Nice work on getting that running - I think this is a perfectly elegant solution!

And yes you guessed right, that our In-Browser Terminal does filter serial ports so only Notecards can connect to it. However, you could just use something like PuTTY or our Notecard CLI pointed at COM20:

notecard -interface serial -port COM20 -portconfig 115200

Then run notecard -play for interactive mode.

Hope that helps!
Rob

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Thanks Rob,

I have this running reliably now using the CLI as as well as some Windows Powershell scripts (and also TeraTerm which works a bit better than Putty. Works great and I’ve had some very successful skylo tests now. Just for anyone else reading - i tried USBIP too and failed, so am using ser2net on the RPi and HW VSP3 on Windows to join them up. I’ve written a full doc of the adventure if anyone is interested! Getting about 2 days battery life using a Voltaic V50 USB Battery Pack, which is plenty for me testing.