RedCon: An Open Source Tool for Remote Access to an Electronic Board

Abstract

Increased connectivity has ramped up the ability of working from remote locations; people from all over the world can work on the same software project making use of online collaboration tools. Covid-19 pandemic has brought conditions in which organizations that have remote working capabilities become advantageous. Many software engineers continued working under quarantine; the ability of working from home has made it possible. But still embedded software development has its own challenges to overcome in working from remote locations like the need of easy access and remote control of electronic board setups. To address these challenges, we propose RedCon; an open source tool which enables users to access their electronic boards remotely through the internet. RedCon is deployed to a host computer which is connected to the target board to be remotely accessed. A host may even be a single board computer, giving users the chance of having a costeffective remote access solution. A user can forward traffic within the target board virtual LAN, access serial interfaces, control USB memory devices and power cycle the target board through a web-based GUI with user authentication which runs on a web server on the host. Host acts as a gateway between the target board and the network it is connected to. User needs to access to the network to which the host is connected to. A very common scenario would be RedCon to be deployed at a host which is at the office. Thus, the host is connected to the office network and a remote user accesses the office network by VPN. Then, remote user can access the target board by using RedCon.