14 posts authored by “Alan Boris”

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Deploy and manage Plate Recognizer with balena

A popular use case for simple machine learning on current single board computers is license plate recognition. (Also known as “automatic license plate recognition” or ALPR) ALPR is used by many industries but is particularly useful for toll collection, property management and in the parking industry. blog header Plate Recognizer is a company that has a variety of paid and free products that…

January 20, 2023 / 10 min

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How to use NVIDIA Jetson devices on balena

The Jetson line of modules brings accelerated AI to edge devices, allowing for truly innovative uses for IoT devices. The balena platform supports these modules (Nano, TX2, Xavier, Orin), enabling you to deploy, maintain, and update fleets of one to hundreds of thousands with ease. This is the third update of our series about how to use Jetson devices on the balena platform. How to use edge AI…

January 11, 2023 / 17 min

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Introducing balenAir: an affordable air quality monitor for the home or office

Learn why we decided to build an indoor air quality device under the new balenAir brand powered by our own platform and product-building tools. Introducing balenAir It’s a mission to not only create an amazing product for people all over the world, but also to demonstrate how to use the balena ecosystem from end to end: using balena Blocks and App Enablement to create the code, balenaCloud to…

July 26, 2022 / 4 min

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How to use an NVIDIA GPU on an x86 device with balenaOS

Some projects, especially ones utilizing machine learning require access to the computing power of an attached graphics processing unit (GPU). This is the case for software that depends on CUDA, NVIDIA’s parallel programming model. Use Nvidia GPU on x86 device with balenaOS We've demonstrated how to enable CUDA on Jetson-based devices running balenaOS, but in this guide, we'll outline how to…

December 21, 2021 / 6 min

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How to use BLE to communicate between an Arduino running Edge Impulse and a Pi running balenaOS

In this post, we’ll look at how Edge Impulse and balena work together and what led me down the path to improvise a solution using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) so the two could communicate with each other. Illustration of Edge Impulse and balena project I’ve been fascinated by the work of Edge Impulse, which is a platform that allows devices such as microcontrollers and single board computers to…

September 30, 2021 / 7 min

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balenaSense v2: Updated temperature, pressure, and humidity monitoring for Raspberry Pi

Welcome to version 2.0 of balenaSense, featuring a number of radical changes that rendered previous guides somewhat outdated. Using an outdated guide is no fun, so, we present a new project tutorial for balenaSense v2. balenaSense was designed to make it easy to take temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and other readings from sensors and provide a dashboard to see this information at a…

July 09, 2021 / 17 min

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balenaBlocks in-depth: Sensor and Pulse

In this post, we introduce the sensor and pulse blocks, both designed to make it easy to bring data from sensors and other equipment into your projects. We’ll also look at the decisions made during the development of these blocks in order to keep their setup and usage simple, as well as a few example projects that utilize multiple blocks. In a previous post we introduced balenaBlocks, which are…

May 04, 2021 / 13 min

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How to use Nvidia Jetson devices on balena

Access the full capabilities of Jetson devices in balenaCloud. Recent versions of balenaOS provide easy access to JetPack components, giving your containers access to the GPU’s power. Learn how to build a project to start accessing a world of AI tools, including CUDA and OpenCV, below. How to use edge AI tools with Nvidia and balenaOS Hardware refresher Nvidia Jetson is a series of embedded…

December 15, 2020 / 14 min

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Analyze sounds using Coral AI on the edge and fleet intelligence, Part 1

Can we use AI to help us identify and quantify noise pollution? In this project, we’re using a Coral Dev Board or a Raspberry Pi 4 with an attached Edge TPU to listen to ambient sounds 24/7 and categorize them for us. Use AI to identify and quantify sounds with Coral + balena We’ll also demonstrate how we could deploy a fleet of these devices (e.g. across an entire city) and feed new information…

October 22, 2020 / 14 min

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Using OpenDataCam and balena to "quantify the world" with AI

Learn how to run OpenDataCam on balenaCloud, which adds a number of features to make managing a device (or a fleet of dozens) easy. This guide features deployment, remote configuration, how to use the built-in VPN, a public URL, and monitoring device diagnostics. What is OpenDataCam? OpenDataCam is an open source project, by move Lab, that tracks moving objects with live video analysis using CUDA…

June 19, 2020 / 12 min

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Getting Started with the Nvidia Jetson Nano using balena

UPDATED 11 Jan 2023: Note that as of 11 January 2023, we have an updated guide here with a more streamlined method to accomplish the examples in this post, as well as more background information about using Nvidia Jetson devices with balena. When you’re building applications to run on the Nvidia Jetson Nano, you’ll often have a list of underlying libraries and dependencies such as CUDA, OpenCV…

February 26, 2020 / 7 min

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Running OpenWebRX on balena to remotely monitor local radio spectrum

Combine a Raspberry Pi and an inexpensive SDR (Software-Defined Radio) dongle to create a remote monitoring device that you can place anywhere in the world (with internet access) to view the surrounding radio spectrum and stream audio from some of the detected signals. Combine balena and OpenWebRX to create a remote radio monitoring, visualization, and listening device It hosts a small web server…

January 15, 2020 / 9 min

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Monitor air quality around your home with Home Assistant and balena

UPDATE on 12 May 2021: Note that the latest version of balenaSense (v2) no longer provides air quality readings or support for the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT. To learn more about these changes, see this section of the project’s readme file. This guide illustrates how to run Home Assistant using balena on a Raspberry Pi to create a beautiful dashboard accessible from anywhere in the world. In the case…

December 16, 2019 / 13 min

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Build an “LED Alerter” for your remote work office setup

With many people now working from home due to recent events, it would be useful to have a device that alerts household members when we are on a call, in a meeting, or are otherwise preoccupied. In this tutorial we will build a web-controlled set of LEDs that you can use whenever you need to send a visual signal of your availability to someone in the next room (or on the other side of the world…

November 21, 2019 / 17 min