11 August 2022 / Last updated: 11 Aug 2022

balena monthly roundup - August 2022

You might remember that a little while ago we renamed balenaCloud “applications” to Fleets. This month we surfaced a new concept on balenaHub and balenaCloud: Apps. Apps are a response to a specific use case, built out of many services or balenaBlocks, and are self-contained, doing only their job on a single device.

Also in this month's email:

An introduction to balenaAir
A tutorial on analyzing radio waves with balena
Catch up on the latest balenaHub Meet-up

The latest from balena

Introducing balenaAir

balenaAir is an affordable air quality monitor for the home or office which we built in light of Covid-19 to monitor the air quality in our own offices, and now you can build your own.

The latest balenaLabs resident graduates with their project which uses Software Defined Radio, RTL power, and balena to visualize and analyze signal frequency bands easily.

Read the tutorial

balenaHub Meetup #4

This month we put the spotlight on two of the Fleets on balenaHub trying to make a positive change in our society; LearnersBlock and The Ribbit Network. Catch up on the recording to hear more about them from their creators.

Watch the recording

This month on balenaHub

Check out some of our newest Open Fleets, Projects and Blocks on balenaHub.

Balena-woof - Help your dog communicate using a button, speaker, and RPi!
ISEG_RPI - The most popular digital signage project for the RPi
Balena-unifi - Unifi controller allows you to set up your Ubiquiti Unifi devices
Kolibri-app - An adaptable set of open solutions specially developed to support learning

Community Highlights

Join us at The Things Conference

Balena Developer Advocate Marc Pous will be speaking about how you can build your own private LoRaWAN network server and gateway at this year's The Things Conference, find out more and get your ticket here to join us.

Easier updates for your device offline

A community member has shared their solution on the balena forums for performing an offline update on their device using an interactive bash script.

Theia Scientific present their hub application at GrafanaCon 2022

Catch up on Theia Scientific’s talk at GrafanaCon where they discuss their balenaHub application which uses Grafana and machine learning for real-time microscopy image analysis.

Use CM4 IO board’s Real-time clock inside a container

This blogpost from linuxfixes walks you through how to make your CM4 IO board remember the newly set datetime whenever the device reboots, overriding the one you previously set.

Create a digital marketing display using the Browser Block

This month, one of the balena Ambassadors shared on the forums how they created a low-cost, easily maintained digital marketing display for local shops using the browser block and balena.

Using balena and Edge Impulse to detect fire

Check out the Raspberry Pi Foundations video where a young community member presents her project which uses balena and Edge Impulse machine learning to tackle the real-world problem of wildfires in her community.

Work with us

We’re looking for a number of roles for our growing team.

Picker - Athens

Check them out, or if you think you could be a great fit for balena, design your own role and introduce yourself to us via open call. We’d love to get to know you better.