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Show HN: Remote terminal via WebRTC, incl. file-transfer – no SSH/VPN required (transitiverobotics.com)

22 points by chfritz ↗ HN
Perhaps the easiest way to get a shell on your remote devices wherever they are (even behind NATs and firewalls) -- no VPN required. Offers file transfer right from the terminal itself.

Because it is web-based and connects via WebRTC it is better than VPN + SSH in every way: - no setup required on the client machine, it hence works on all OSs and even your phone, - it will always find the shortest-path to your robots, meaning it won’t go through the cloud if you are on the same network as your robot - still end-to-end encrypted - file upload via drag & drop - file download by clicking on filenames in ls

The UI component can be embedded anywhere you like and you can specify the device to connect to directly in the embedding code.

This solves a common pain-point in robotics, but seems equally useful in many other applications. Please share your thoughts and questions if you have any!

Short demo: https://youtu.be/doYcVNRtbAU

7 comments

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predictabl3
I personally would wait to show it until it's usable. The self-hosting docs say "forthcoming". I'm quite interested to learn more, whenever that might be.
chfritz
It is usable right now and beta customers have been using it in production for a while, just not in the self-hosted version. You can sign up here and try it right now: https://transitiverobotics.com/.
chfritz
Sorry, it appears that our registration page may have been down when you tried it. Please try again now. Registration to our beta is open again.
tamimio
So you wrap open source tools/middleware like ROS 1/2, gstreamer, webrtc et al and you want to charge $20/month per robot?! You realize not a single robotic engineer will use that and they will just use these tools directly for free? It would a good idea to have it open source with none of that subscription crap as mostly in robotics you have either PoC and those will SSH into the SBC and use these tools for free, or a fully funded projects and those will have a team to build a UI around these tools similar to yours, so your audience are slim right here.
amadeuspagel
I would say that this reminds me of the classical dropbox comment, except that that comment was friendly advice and this comment is ... not.
chfritz
It's not $20 it's $5. And saying that all we did was "wrap" a few open-source libraries is a bit naive. Webrtc is great, but still a maturing technology based on dozens of RFCs that are only in the process of becoming standards. Making it work outside a browser is anything but easy. Making it work reliably over unreliable networks with congestion control, packet loss mitigation, and hardware acceleration, etc. is hard, especially when you need to support OSs that are already a few years old -- as is, of course, common in robotics.

If a robotics company will "have a team [to] build" it themselves, will that be free? Far from it! Let's pretend it would only take two people one quarter to implement all this (in reality it took a lot longer -- but maybe we are dumb!), then that's ~$100k to build it and you'd still need to keep paying these engineers to maintain that code every now and then. Even if the company has 100 robots, paying for our service would only cost $6,000 a year. So the $100k would only amortize after 17 years -- ignoring maintenance, which, in fact, may cost more per month than our service.

Almost every company I know uses Slack. But why? They could have just implemented a chat themselves, no? After all there are great open-source tools that you just need to "wrap", no? Sure, they could have. But that would've hardly been cheaper, would have born risk, taken time away from their own mission, and the result wouldn't be nearly as good.

chfritz
If you previously tried to register and couldn't, please try again now. The registration to our beta is open again.