Field diagnostics
HALO Field is a mobile-first diagnostics UI for in-field testing. The halo-field binary serves it on remote nodes over port 80. Connect a phone to a node's WiFi hotspot and an instant network health dashboard loads in the browser — no login, designed for quick access in the field.
What it shows
The dashboard surfaces the state an operator needs to place and align a node:
- Eight-state mesh status.
- Signal strength with color coding.
- Gateway latency.
- GPS position.
- WireGuard status.
- System stats — CPU, memory, storage, uptime.
Because it runs locally on the node and serves without authentication, halo-field responds even when SSH over the overlay does not. From the gateway, curl http://10.42.0.2:80/api/diag is a reliable diagnostic fallback.
Field test mode
A START/STOP control records a measurement session. While running, the node samples every 5 seconds and writes a CSV row capturing signal, GPS (node-local and gateway), distance, and throughput.
- Distance is computed with the haversine formula. The gateway position is cached on the node, so distance is available offline.
- CSV files are written to
/var/lib/halo/field-tests/and persist across reboots.
Speedtest
The speedtest measures throughput through the WireGuard tunnel: a 2 MB download and a 1 MB upload. This reflects real overlay performance between the node and the gateway, not raw radio link rate.
GPS
Position comes from gpsd. The field UI shows fix mode, latitude, longitude, altitude, speed, and satellites in use. Gateway distance uses the cached gateway position so it works without a live link back to the control plane.
HALO Field is unauthenticated by design — it is intended for physical access to a node in the field. Treat hotspot range as the trust boundary.
Where to go next
- Read GPS and power directly from the CLI in haloctl.
- Understand the overlay the speedtest measures in networking.