15 posts authored by “Daniel Andrade”

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balena monthly roundup - September 2019

Big news from balenaHQ! Since the release of the Raspberry Pi 4 back in June we’ve been working tirelessly to bring support to balenaOS. Our work has resulted in the first, fully-functional, 64-bit OS for the Raspberry Pi 4, allowing you to mix and match multiple container architectures on this new device. In addition to this groundbreaking work, we’ve put together a very detailed account of the…

September 16, 2019 / 6 min

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balena monthly roundup - August 2019

Oh my, it’s hard to believe it’s only been a month since we last emailed as so much has happened! We’re excited to give you all a quick roundup of everything you shouldn’t miss out on. Perhaps the biggest news of the month is that we closed our series B investment round which means we’re now looking to grow the team and have a bunch of open positions. We’ve built a cool digital photo frame for…

August 14, 2019 / 7 min

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Use a Raspberry Pi to communicate with Amazon AWS IoT

When developing an IoT project, there are many things to take into account, from choosing the hardware and software to the infrastructure where you will host all the sensor data. Gladly managing a device fleet with balenaCloud is as easy as typing git push. The next step is to think about how the devices should behave, are they going to be sending sensor data, receiving instructions to control…

July 15, 2019 / 8 min

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Bring a dummy security camera to life, using a Raspberry Pi and WebRTC

A few weeks ago we released a project called balenaCam where @mbalamat developed an application running on balenaOS that initiates a WebRTC video streaming connection between the server (a Raspberry Pi, for example) and the client. You can check the full blog post here. Once the main core of the application was stable, we decided to challenge ourselves and take the project down a slightly…

June 07, 2019 / 10 min

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Build a smart photo slideshow with balenaCloud

Last updated: 26th October, 2020 When we started the balenaDash project, the main goal was to make it easy and straightforward to deploy IoT devices that display information on a screen. We've updated the photo component into its own standalone project. Build this project to create a photo slideshow hosted on Google Photo Albums, Dropbox Photo Album, or Apple Photos. Photo Gallery is a physical…

May 15, 2019 / 5 min

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Deploy a fleet of environmental sensors with balena & InfluxDB

Last month Alex Markessinis released a very nice project based on balenaSense to manage the temperature and humidity of a data center and upload the data to an external InfluxDB database. Follow along as we go through the process of setting up this project to capture data from remote sensors and send the data to a central InfluxDB database with the help of a Raspberry Pi and balenaCloud. Hardware…

May 13, 2019 / 6 min

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How to protect your device with PiJuice and balenaCloud

Last week we published a blog post reviewing some UPS (uninterruptible power supply) HATS for the balenaFin and Raspberry Pi to keep your device up and running during power outages. In this post, we will show you how you can easily add the PiJuice to your current project with the magic of multi-containers so that you can keep tabs on the power status of your devices. PiJuice Board As mentioned…

April 16, 2019 / 4 min

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balena monthly roundup - April 2019

We’re fully out of Winter hibernation now (for those of the team in the Northern hemisphere, anyway), and have been working tirelessly to deploy new features, and to create new projects and demos for you. We’ve got balenaSense which uses InfluxDB and Grafana to make pretty charts of air quality, some great examples of deploying X11 apps and accessing them via VNC, some new diagnostic tools in the…

April 11, 2019 / 5 min

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Running a full desktop in a container

While building your next Internet-of-things (IoT) project, sometimes you get to a point where you need to run applications that are made to run on a screen, we call them graphical user interface (GUI) applications. After multiple requests from our users, we decided to write a short tutorial explaining how you can run a desktop manager or a GUI application with balenaCloud or openBalena on any kind…

March 12, 2019 / 7 min

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Running a GUI application with balenaCloud

Have you ever got to a point while working on a project where you absolutely had to run a graphical user interface (GUI) application when you only have access to a headless device? This is an issue that one of our engineers Chris faced a while back while working on the Festive Lighting project, where the software to control the lights only had a GUI version. One solution to this problem lies in…

February 18, 2019 / 5 min

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Monitoring your balena devices with Datadog

Updated 28 July 2020: Double-checked that we're using the latest Datadog build steps. Here at balena, we have developed a complete set of tools to deploy and manage your fleet of IoT devices, but what if you also want a monitor detailed metrics of a single device or of your entire fleet? That’s when Datadog comes into play as a great complement to your balenaCloud setup. Datadog is software as a…

January 10, 2019 / 6 min

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Using Google Slides with balenaDash

Set up your balenaDash display with a slideshow using Google Slides A fun thing you can do with your display is to have a slideshow of photos, from your last trip to Europe, Thanksgiving with the family or simply some inspirational pictures. For this, you can use Google Slides, so go ahead and create a new slide project, adding one picture per slide. For this example, there are some trekking…

December 04, 2018 / 1 min

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Create a GPS tracking system with cell connectivity and minimal bandwidth

In this tutorial, we're going to build a GPS tracking system using a balenaFin board, balenaCloud and a Hologram SIM card. This post outlines the steps to create a GPS tracking system, a useful project in its own right, but also a great way to experience a few features rolling out soon in the balena ecosystem. Follow along as we go step-by-step through the entire process of setting everything up…

November 13, 2018 / 11 min

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Build a Bitcoin traffic light with balenaCloud

Follow along and build your own as we hack a traffic light to make a cool Bitcoin value indicator for your desk or office using a Raspberry Pi and balenaCloud. Bitcoin (₿) was initially released at the beginning of January 2009 by an unknown person/group with the codename of "Satoshi Nakamoto", and since the beginning of its existence, the price has been extremely volatile, going from just a few…

October 31, 2018 / 5 min

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How to keep your device up and running during power outages

Deploying an Internet-of-Things (IoT) project to production can involve various complex and unexpected problems, such as firmware updates, system reliability and many more. By using balenaCloud to deploy and manage your fleet, most of these headaches can be avoided. However, if your device loses power, there is very little we can do to ensure the device remains operating and online. With that in…

October 24, 2018 / 6 min