13 posts authored by “John Tonello”

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Offline Updates make it easier to update balena devices without the internet

Many balenaCloud users enjoy the seamless integration between their connected IoT devices and our tools that make device monitoring, managing, and updating easy. However, what if your devices have limited connectivity by design? Introducing Offline Updates: a process that lets you to preload and reflash a device so it retains its unique balena identity, apps, and configurations-- all without a…

February 09, 2021 / 6 min

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Introducing the new balenaCloud sidebar

During balena's Release Party 3, our team designed and deployed a new sidebar on balenaCloud in less than eight hours. This includes improvement of the menu experience and innovative breadcrumbs. Thanks to every teammate who contributed to redesign the sidebar. Better navigation for better fleet management We’ve been looking to update the balenaCloud dashboard menu for some time to make it more…

December 22, 2020 / 2 min

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Balena introduces new collaboration and organization management features

We’ve been thinking a lot about how companies and teams work together on balenaCloud, and wanted to make it easier to collaborate without sacrificing control or security. The result of our work is a new top-level feature called Organizations. Start using Organizations in balenaCloud today With this release, Organizations become central to device, application and user management across our platform…

December 17, 2020 / 4 min

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Holiday gift suggestions for the hardware hackers in your life

With the holidays right around the corner, I asked my balena colleagues to suggest gift ideas for the tech-minded people in their lives -- and yours -- and they came up with some interesting stuff. Some of these things you might want for yourself, so consider it a list for giving and receiving, which I’ve broken down into three categories: gear, tools, and books. This list is by no means…

November 27, 2020 / 8 min

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Why is the balenaFin right for fleet owners? Part 3: Networking

This is the third in a series of posts about the key features that make the balenaFin the right choice for IoT fleet owners. For those who aren’t familiar with the balenaFin, you can take a look at this introductory post. We’ve divided the series into three posts that cover the main categories: storage, power and networking. When it comes time to choose an IoT device for professional workloads…

November 16, 2020 / 6 min

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Cellular + IoT isn't as hard as you think

I’ve always been a bit hesitant to add cellular networking to my IoT projects because I figured the cost of bandwidth and the hardware requirements were more trouble than they were worth. But after some experimentation, I got over my fears and found cellular wasn’t nearly as expensive or as complicated as I thought. In this blog post, I’ll explain how I went about adding cellular network service…

October 27, 2020 / 10 min

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Infarm uses balena to make farm-to-table work

Sustainably feeding the planet is at the heart of the farm-to-table movement and the motivation behind a new breed of tech companies working to make locally grown herbs and vegetables commercially viable. Balena is there to help. For Berlin-based Farm-as-a-Service company Infarm, the answer to food-to-table farming is remote-controlled microfarms that use edge technology to optimize growing…

September 22, 2020 / 5 min

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'Deploy with balena' makes it easier to deploy and share IoT apps

Have you ever shared an open source IoT project only to be overwhelmed with questions about how to deploy it, or underwhelmed with the lack of adoption by the community? Even if you labor over your README instructions, it can be hard to make device provisioning and deployments simple and repeatable. Streamline how you deploy your IoT application Our new Deploy with balena capability lets you…

September 03, 2020 / 5 min

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How my cat helped me build a better IoT app

Modernizing my app made it far easier to spy on my American Shorthair. My cat Tucker is a somewhat predictable animal who likes to curl up in predictable spots around the house, so he’s the perfect subject for surreptitious video surveillance and just the sort of motivating force I needed to rework a Raspberry Pi project I’d been putting off for some time. I’d previously set up video surveillance…

August 18, 2020 / 13 min

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IoT professionals: define your role

If you’re like most IoT professionals, you’re something of a jack-of-all-trades who’s part full-stack engineer, edge developer, hardware specialist, network guru, data analyst, and visionary all rolled into one. But what do you call yourself? Just as “system administrator” doesn’t really tell the whole story anymore, modern alternatives like “DevOps Engineer” or “Cloud Architect” or “Security…

March 17, 2020 / 1 min

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Local Mode and livepush make balenaCloud app development faster

Editor's Note, 25 March 2021: Edge developers can now access balenaBlocks pre-built containerized services ready to drop into new applications. Check them out on balenaHub. Developing containerized applications can be time-consuming, particularly when they have multiple services and you want to ensure they run properly on different platforms and IoT devices. With balenaCloud Local Mode and…

March 13, 2020 / 7 min

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Are you buying the right devices for your IoT workloads?

There was a time when IoT devices were merely low-powered boards capable of doing a single chore, albeit in far-flung locales. Today, boards like the balenaFin, Raspberry Pi 3 and 4, and NVIDIA are powerful multi-core microcomputers with plenty of horsepower to spare. How do you decide which is best for your application? How do you know which device you need to fit your IoT workload? The capacity…

January 24, 2020 / 9 min

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How to use balenaCloud container contracts in mixed-device environments to fine-tune your fleet

If you’re like most folks running an IoT environment, you have a mix of devices that don’t always support the same services and drivers, despite their common architecture. With balenaCloud container contracts, you can set rules that prevent devices from getting upgrades that make them fail -- and keep your entire fleet healthy. High-level diagram of how container contracts works With balenaCloud…

January 21, 2020 / 5 min