Request to improve the Anjay Demo Client?

[eabase]

Hi,

I was just trying out the latest Anjay Demo client on a Nordic Thingy:91.
However, I found it very non-intuitive and hard to work with from the terminal, compared to other solutions.

For an example of a great working terminal shell, please flash the latest Nordic "Modem Shell" called:
thingy91_modem_shell_2023-06-01_0677b099.hex from [1].

Some of the issues I encounter and would like to help fix/improve are:

• Improve the help command info and formatting.
• More clear and better formatted anjay config show info.
• Enable the LED colors for providing links status!
  At the moment the LED is OFF and not used at all, so you can't even tell if the device is on!
• Enable terminal ANSI coloring from within anjay shell.
• Enable disable local echo (as it's missing in Nordic AT command set.)
• Being able to enable/disable GNSS/GPS from the anjay shell. (Similar to link funmode --gnssoff in [1].)
• Being able to also select between: NB-IoT and LTE-M from the anjay shell.
• Being able to enable/disable Bluetooth from within the anjay shell.
• Make a more informative anjay status command mimicking the "link status" command from [1].
• Command completion doesn't work very well...making it hard to find all the command options.
• Provide more info on undocumented anjay commands, such as: public_cert, private_key.
  (Are there more?)

References:
[1] - Nordic Thingy:91 Modem Downloads.
[2] - Lost LTE Connection due to LTE/GPS competition

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How can I help you contribute to this?

[Mierunski]

Hi,
Great to hear that you are interested in contributing!

Regarding the issues, we often face a trade-off between runtime configuration options and flash size optimizations. As client has to fit on small devices, not everything can be configured in runtime to save some space, especially features like ANSI coloring, local echo, command completion or GPS which can be enabled in compilation options.

Some documentation about options is described with our IoT devzone: https://iotdevzone.avsystem.com/docs/LwM2M_Client/Getting_started/
which can also be contributed to: https://github.com/AVSystem/developer-zone

Contributions are always welcome through Pull Requests, we can agree on the scope here or on Discord channel: https://discord.avsystem.com/

Best regards
Mieszko

[eabase]

Hi @Mierunski

Some documentation about options is described with our IoT devzone...

Unfortunately there is nearly no documentation about the Anjay CLI options there...

face a trade-off between runtime configuration options and flash size optimizations

Of course, but the trade-off should not be on the main functionality of modem functions. I can certainly live without command completion and ANSI coloring etc. But local echo is a basic AT standard command requirement, so why that was removed together with CFUN and being able to turn BT and GNSS on/off, doesn't make sense. The Anjay demo client is most likely using AT commands (to configure the modem settings) behind the scenes anyway, so if that is the case, the implementation should be trivial.

Thanks, I will have a look at Discord.