CREATOR Remote Laboratory

The remote laboratory allows users to remotely execute their programs on real hardware through the use of multiple CREATOR Gateways.

[!IMPORTANT] Currently, only the ESP32 Gateway is supported.

Figure: CREATOR Remote Laboratory

Setup and configuration

The recommended way of running the remote laboratory is through the Docker image.

[!TIP] For alternative ways of execution, check the source repository.

First, create a file structure such as this:

creator-remote-lab/
├─ compose.yaml
├─ results/
├─ config/
│  ├─ deployment.json

On the remote lab container configuration:

• results/ must be mounted to /app/results/ and config/ to /app/config/
• The server will listen on port 5000, so we should expose that port
• In order to send the results via email, you must set your Google Mail address in the EMAIL environment variable and your app pasword in the PASSW environment variable.

We should also deploy the gateways. More information on CREATOR Gateway.

We can do all this with Docker Compose, in the compose.yaml file:

services:
  creator-remote-lab:
    image: creatorsim/creator-remote-lab:latest
    volumes:
      - ./config:/app/config
      - ./results:/app/results
    ports:
      - "5000:5000"
    environment:
      - EMAIL=test@inf.uc3m.es  # google mail address
      - PASSW=abcdefghijklmnop  # google app password

  target-0:
    image: creatorsim/creator-gateway-esp32:latest
    devices:
      - /dev/ttyUSB0
    stdin_open: true
    tty: true

  target-1:
    image: creatorsim/creator-gateway-esp32:latest
    devices:
      - /dev/ttyUSB1
    stdin_open: true
    tty: true

The configuration of the target boards is placed in config/deployment.json. You must provide the type of board (target_board), the USB port of the board (target_port), and the URL of the gateway server (target_url). As we're doing everything with Docker Compose, we can just use their container names. E.g.:

{
  "target-0": {
    "target_board": "esp32c3",
    "target_port": "/dev/ttyUSB0",
    "target_url": "http://target-0:8080"
  },
  "target-1": {
    "target_board": "esp32c3",
    "target_port": "/dev/ttyUSB1",
    "target_url": "http://target-1:8080"
  }
}

The execution results will be stored in the results/ folder.

Then, we can deploy everything with:

docker compose up