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Workbench is a live GUI for a single box’s instruments. Pick a box, expand an instrument, and control its nets directly from the browser — set a supply voltage, open a UART console, toggle a GPIO, watch a battery simulator — without writing a script or dropping to the CLI. Where Factory runs a scripted, repeatable suite for production/QA, Workbench is for interactive, hands-on bench work: bringing a board up, poking at one net, or reproducing a problem by hand.

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Choosing a box

Open Workbench from the sidebar and pick a box from the Box selector. Only boxes that are online with a configured IP address are selectable — Workbench talks to the box in real time, so an offline or IP-less box can’t be driven. If a box is locked, the selector shows the lock state: green when you hold the lock (you can still drive it) and amber when someone else holds it. See box locking.

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Instruments and nets

Once a box is selected, Workbench lists its instruments, grouped by physical device and kept live by the box’s USB scan. Each card shows whether the instrument is currently connected, and expands to reveal a control panel per net: Most panels are request/response: they read the net’s current state and let you change it (voltage, enable/disable, a GPIO level). The UART panel is different — it opens a streaming serial console over a WebSocket, with selectable line endings, so you can type to the device and watch output scroll in real time.
Workbench drives the nets that are already configured on the box. It does not create nets. If an instrument is detected but has no net yet, its card links to the box’s Nets tab; add the net there (or in Lager), then return to Workbench. See the Boxes reference.

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Webcams

From the box picker, View Webcams opens the box’s camera streams — handy for watching the bench while you drive an instrument from the same screen. Webcams also live on the box detail page’s Webcams tab. A box’s Nets tab can jump straight into Workbench with the box and instrument preselected:
This is the quickest path from “I can see this net on the box” to “I’m driving it.”

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Where the hardware logic lives

Workbench is a thin, interactive front end over Lager’s net model — the actual instrument drivers, net definitions, and the lager CLI/Python API all belong to Lager. Stout adds the multi-user, access-controlled, browser-based way to reach them.

Lager: interacting with nets

The lager CLI commands and Python API behind each Workbench panel.

Boxes & fleet

Register boxes, configure nets, and manage locks and maintenance.