Thank you for your feedback, Jose! Glad to hear the new feature worked well for you!

Adding the support for .njlog output was the right thing to do; thanks for bringing that up originally and with that, adjusting our TODO list priority

Apologies for the delayed response. Support for njlog output directly from ioninja-hwc is on our TODO list (it was already requested by users). For the time being, you need to post-process the raw output of ioninja-hwc using any scripting language of your choice.

The protocol of communication between ioninja-hwc and plugins such as Serial over SSH or Serial Tap over SSH is not currently documented, but the decoding process and all relevant constants and data structures can be looked up in the sources of those plugins (remember, all IO Ninja plugins are open-sourced and available at ioninja/scripts/plugins).

In particular, all the relevant constants and packet structures for the ioninja-hwc protocol are contained in ioninja/scripts/common/io_HwcProto.jnc. The output file generated by ioninja-hwc is basically a sequence of "out" messages of this protocol. Each message starts with HwcMsgHdr followed by extra data block, the meaning of which depends on the message code. For example, HwcMsgCode.Rx is followed by the received bytes, HwcMsgCode.SerialTapCtsDsr is followed by HwcSerialStatusLines flags, etc.

Try decoding the output of ioninja-hwc using any language of your choice, and feel free to let me know if you run into a stumbling block or have any other questions.

My end goal is to generate a log file (like an .njlog if possible) through terminal alone. If there's a different way to get a log file without needing to open the IDE I'd really appreciate the help

Running a remote X-server is an option, yes. It actually was the only option for running Serial Tap remotely before the release of ioninja-hwc. Now that we have ioninja-hwc, it should be the preferred approach in most cases.

We also consider extending the Serial over SSH (and other remote tap plugins) with an option of keeping the ioninja-hwc process persistent across SSH reconnects (via screen or some other terminal manager).

Once again, apologies for the delayed reply

Yes, in IO Ninja 5.1 we added a CLI tool (ioninja-hwc) for direct communication with Serial Tap and other IO Ninja hardware. The main purpose of this tool was to network-enable the IO Ninja Taps (i.e., to access those over SSH). As such, the output from this tool must satisfy certain requirements (e.g., reliably distinguish between ioninja-hwc messages and SSH server errors, like ioninja-hwc not found). The .njlog format is not very suitable for that, that's why we didn't use it by default (we actually used the protocol from our test fixture for Serial and other Taps).

This said, we can of course add .njlog output as an extra feature -- just like we have .pcap output. We probably will do that in one of the upcoming releases.

1. Regarding the format of the output -- since all the scripts in IO Ninja are open-source, you can check the sources of decoder in ioninja/scripts/common/io_HwcProto.jnc. This file contains file structure definitions, packet type code constants, and the decoder itself.

2. You are right, there are no timestamps in this protocol. Serial Tap doesn't timestamp individual bytes (Serial Tap basically is a dual-channel USB-to-UART). We can, of course, add timestamps inside ioninja-hwc, but in case of SSH communications, it's not that much different from timestamping on the SSH client side (as we do now). And after we support the .njlog format for file output, adding timestamps to the protocol most likely will not be necessary.

Let me know what you think!

1. I saw that as "sidecar" of the sniffed data there are some other data (4 bytes ?), I suspect it is info about the data origen, perhaps used by the "ioninja" SW in order to identify it. Is there any place where we can check the meaning of these bytes?
2. I suspect that inside this "sidecar" data there is no timestamps. The HW probably does not timestamp its raw data... but it would be quite necessary that the output files writen by the "ioninja-hwc" do include timestamps.
   Regards!!

Alas, currently, there's no support for remote monitoring via Serial Taps -- fiddling with ioninja-server won't cut it... However, it's on our immediate TODO list; we are working on a major update scheduled for the beginning of 2022 which -- among many other things -- will allow controlling Serial Taps and other IO Ninja hardware sniffers connected to remote ARM-based Linux boxes (such as Raspberry Pis).

If waiting for the update is not an option, I suggest writing your own program which would read from a Serial Tap using libusb (or any other low-level USB framework available in the programming language of your choice) and dump the captured data into a file.

The low-level details of USB communication with a Serial Tap (USB VIDs/PIDs, IN/OUT endpoints, packet formats, etc) can be checked in the open-source implementation of the official Serial Tap plugin (see file scripts/plugins/SerialTap/SerialTapSession.jnc). If you are familiar with C-family languages (C, Java, JavaScript, etc) you should be able to read and understand pretty much everything. And of course, feel free to ask any implementation-related questions here.

Hope this clarifies the issue.