tower-cli

Host CLI/TUI for the HARDWARIO TOWER console link. The tower binary connects to a TOWER device over the USB serial port and renders the framed host↔target protocol (COBS + CRC + postcard) emitted by the tower firmware — logs, events, and an interactive shell. (A plain serial monitor shows that link as raw frame bytes; tower decodes it.)

The wire format is shared with the firmware via the tower-protocol crate (pinned to a firmware tag), so the two cannot drift.

Install

Grab the archive for your platform from the latest release, extract it, and put tower on your PATH:

# macOS / Linux
tar -xzf tower-vX.Y.Z-<target>.tar.gz
sudo mv tower-vX.Y.Z-<target>/tower /usr/local/bin/

# verify the download against its checksum
shasum -a 256 -c tower-vX.Y.Z-<target>.tar.gz.sha256

On Windows, extract the .zip and put tower.exe on your PATH.

Platform	Target
Linux x86_64	x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Linux ARM64	aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
Linux ARMv7 (Raspberry Pi)	armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
macOS Intel	x86_64-apple-darwin
macOS Apple Silicon	aarch64-apple-darwin
Windows x86_64	x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

Usage

tower --help          # all commands
tower --version       # print the tower-cli version
tower                 # open the TUI console on the detected device (bare, no subcommand)

The streaming commands render the framed link to stdout:

tower logs                        # decoded logs + print! output
tower logs --color never          # force plain output (--color auto|always|never)
tower events                      # structured key=value events
tower exec "/system/resource"     # run one shell command, print its reply, exit
tower exec "/slow/op" --timeout 5000   # widen the per-command idle timeout (ms)
tower logs --no-reconnect         # exit when the link drops instead of retrying

Colors default to auto: on when stdout is a terminal and NO_COLOR is unset, off when piped or redirected. The first device open is always fatal (a bad --device exits non-zero rather than retrying); reconnection only kicks in after a successful attach, and --no-reconnect disables it entirely.

The device is selected with -d/--device (auto-detected when exactly one USB serial device is present). List what's connected with tower devices.

Exit codes

tower follows a small, stable exit-code contract so scripts and CI can branch on the cause of a failure:

Code	Meaning
0	success
1	tool error (I/O, bad file, encode/decode, protocol-version mismatch)
2	usage error (bad arguments — emitted by clap)
124	device command timed out (no or incomplete response)
1..=123	exec only: the device-reported shell result (clamped into this range)

Flashing firmware

tower can program the device's STM32L0 over its UART bootloader (toggling NRST/BOOT0 through the USB-UART bridge), so a separate flashing tool isn't needed. The bootloader engine is the jolt crate, integrated as a library:

tower flash firmware.bin     # erase, write, verify, then reset into the app
tower flash firmware.bin --no-verify --no-run
tower erase                  # erase the whole flash, reset into the app
tower reset                  # reset into the application
tower reset --bootloader     # reset into the system bootloader

Firmware must be a raw .bin (convert .elf/.hex with arm-none-eabi-objcopy -O binary in.elf out.bin). The device is auto-detected when exactly one USB serial device is present; otherwise pass --device.

Build from source

Requires a Rust toolchain. On Linux the serialport dependency needs libudev:

sudo apt-get install -y libudev-dev pkg-config   # Debian/Ubuntu
cargo build --release                            # binary at target/release/tower