Overview

This guide will show you some of the Bristlemouth features in your Dev Kit + Spotter and Smart Mooring System. By the end of this guide, you’ll be sending data to and from devices, writing and reading to the SD card, sending data remotely over cell/satellite, and updating the firmware.

Contents:

<aside> ⏳ Expect to take about 60 minutes.

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Getting familiar with the Spotter Bristlemouth API

The Sofar Spotter exposes a variety of features over a Bristlemouth API. Using the steps in this guide you’ll be able to access advanced features and direct access to data from the Spotter.

<aside> 📖 For full details, see Spotter Bristlemouth API Doc [Coming Soon]

</aside>

Open two terminal windows at the same time

In the last two guides we used the macOS Terminal and USB serial console to connect to both the Bristlemouth Dev Board and the Spotter. Now we are going to do both at the same time to get familiar with how data is passed across the Bristlemouth network.

  1. End any open USB serial console sessions and close all currently open Terminal windows.
    1. To exit a Python miniterm serial console session, press Ctrl-]
    2. To exit a macOS Terminal window, close the window with the red button in the upper-left of the window.
  2. Open a new macOS Terminal window and use Python’s miniterm to connect to the Dev Board.
  3. Then open a second macOS Terminal window and use Python’s miniterm to connect to the Spotter in that window.

It’s nice to keep things straight by keeping the window containing the Dev board console connection on the left, and the window with the Spotter console connection on the right (or whatever your preference is).

Untitled

<aside> 📝 We will reserve the term “USB serial console” to refer to the USB serial connection into the Spotter or Bristlemouth Development Board’s command line interfaces (CLI).

We will generally reserve the word macOS Terminal to refer to the terminal (which is a Unix shell CLI running on your own computer).

usb-serial-console.png

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Print data to the Spotter console

First, let’s try printing some data from the Dev Board console to the Spotter console.

  1. From the Dev Kit’s console, enter:

    **> spotter printf Hello, Spotter!**