4G/Remote viewing

Thanks for the suggestion, @rvdwegen! Sorry for the delay.

I haven't tested that scenario, but this should be possible today if you plug a third-party USB 4G modem in to the TinyPilot.

Alternatively, if you can get the remote hands folks to plug an Ethernet cable into the TinyPilot, you can pre-configure it for cloud access, which would let you access the TinyPilot anywhere as long as the device has Internet connectivity through the Ethernet cable.

Using Ethernet rather than wifi is a great idea - alas the places I've run into parallel problems with other hardware, the hardware I was trying to get someone to remotely connect didn't have Ethernet.

The idea of a "just plug it in" solution using a mobile data network is one I've often wished for, too. Data plans cost something, but little compared to people's professional downtime, so there probably is a role for that. That said, experience with a project spanning several recent years is that operating data modems can be painful with lots of quirks (for example, I've learned to build provisions for software control over the module power; some of their documents literally tell you to power cycle rather than reset them). So for a really urgent example of this kind of case I have to wonder about the path of just shipping someone a verizon mifi and the tinypilot pre-configured to it.

It's too bad that cheap Android phone models are such a moving target and don't really support typical Linux userland mechanisms, otherwise it would be tempting to try to use one stacked on some sort of custom hub gadget as the core platform for something like this.

I wonder about something like adding a cheap I2C Oled for status, and also to maybe enable joining a wifi network by plugging in a keyboard, scrolling through a list of networks, typing credentials on a real keyboard, etc. Or something could probably be done with BLE and a companion app, either for on site manual wifi configuration or even as a temporary tunnel for remote manual configuration, but the world is full of rabbit holes.

This is an option I have been researching as well. We currently send out Headless PC's to clients that just plug into there Ethernet when it arrives and power up. The system once powered up it will connect to Internet provided client has DHCP enabled. This works 99% of the time for our customers. Once system is booted and connected to the Internet we have full remote access. The issue comes when the system reboot's or has some kind of interuption. Sometimes the system will get stuck on the BIOS screen or something else and sits there waiting for input from a user. Since these systems are headless and we can't remote into system until it fully boots we are stuck. Using a PI-KVM that can give us remote control even during boot up would be great. However the Pi also need's Internet connection. If we could have the Pi use cellular for it's connection then we would always have remote access to the system it's paired with. For remote trouble shooting and setup this would be a huge advantage.

Hopefully someday this is an easy task.

Stan