Introduction
This page introduces concepts and technical aspects of hardshare. If you just want to get started, skip to the Quickstart.
Overview
As illustrated above, the main parts are:
- your robot (also referred to as "device" or "devices"),
- host computer on which a hardshare client runs,
- rerobots infrastructure,
- remote users.
The robot and the surrounding environment are together known as a workspace deployment (or simply, deployment). Robots that are owned and managed by the company rerobots are always presented as deployments with unique IDs. To share your robot via hardshare, it also must be assigned a unique ID.
In hardshare, the terms robot and device are interchangeable. Minimally, it is some hardware with output or input. A workspace can have multiple devices (or multiple robots).
The "rerobots infrastructure" is stuff that handles client requests, provides queues and reservations, sends alerts, etc. It includes facilities like a Python client library and sandboxes. For details, read the rerobots introduction.
The hardshare client is the part that manages the lifecycle of remote access, including advertising that the robot is available, creating SSH tunnels to a local container, and enforcing constraints like input filters.
When you create a deployment, you become the owner and can make adminstrative decisions.
Remote users do not necessarily have rerobots accounts. The kinds of access that are possible depend on the permissions assigned by the owner.
Interfaces Around Instances
The rerobots/hardshare architecture provides for specifying how hardware appears to an instance. If carefully configured, any device can be shared through instances safely and securely. The precise meanings of safe and secure depend on the hardware in the deployment, but the basic organization is the same: associate actions with lifecycle events (e.g., initialization), and filter input and output streams.
The default configuration of a new hardshare client installation does not enforce any contracts. Instances in this case have unfiltered access to hardware. This can be a good first choice in trusted settings, such as a team working closely together at the same company.