15 January 2020 / Last updated: 13 Feb 2020

balena monthly roundup - January 2020

Happy new year! It’s great to be starting another fresh new year, but what a year 2019 was; we released balenaFin v1.1, added edge device diagnostics, released livepush, secured funding to grow our team, saw balena operated from space, and released the first 64-bit OS for RaspberryPi 4. Phew!

We’re pushing into 2020 and working hard to bring the next batch of game-changing IoT developments to production, all the while working with our mission to reduce friction for fleet owners in mind. See you at the edge! 🛫

Company News

We now support the Coral Dev Board by Google

You can now install balenaOS and use balenaCloud with the Coral Dev Board. Here’s a sample project that you can use to test things (get in touch if you run into any problems).

Check it out on GitHub

balenaSound: new features added

We’ve been working on some of your feature requests for balenaSound, this time around we added PIN code support and Bluetooth reconnection features. Check out the updated project and feel free to suggest new features or contributions. A big thanks to AlexProgrammerDE who’s been leading the community effort.

Check it out on GitHub

The latest from our blog

How to customize an LED matrix… all from a web browser

The holidays might be over, but that just means there’s plenty of time to uplevel next year’s lighting game. Use this guide to create a Pi-driven customizable LED matrix. It works for a tree, but anywhere else you need some addressable LEDs too (let’s face it, where don’t you need addressable LEDs?).

Imagine the ability to access your home automation and environmental data from anywhere in the world (with an internet connection, of course). Well, imagine no more because here’s a guide on running Home Assistant using balena on a Raspberry Pi!

NEW: Every month, Charlie the Unicorn takes a break from the CLI and lets us in on some power user moves.
This month, we discover how to pipe commands into balena via SSH. Very useful to quickly run a command on a device in a non-interactive way.

Community projects of the month

Every month we like to feature a few projects built by the community, this month it’s:

The tale of the bee-saving Christmas tree

Take a look at this incredible 64x Nvidia Jetson Nano Xmas Tree build, created by the team at Apic.ai. The cluster runs openbalena and performs deep learning on video streams of bees entering and exiting their hives, studying behavior, food, environment, and other factors. It’s a great cause and an amazing project

Putting the platform to work

Here’s a great look at a user putting balenaCloud to the test-- see how they manage multiple devices from one dashboard. Check out his example to see how easy it can be to manage your fleet, big or small.

Giving speakers new wireless functionality with balenaSound

Shoutout to Dimitris for putting balenaSound to the test. Did you know that it now supports Apple Airplay and Spotify Connect along with Bluetooth? Give it a test.

Job spotlight: FleetOps Engineer

Our FleetOps engineers are support-driven developers, and are renowned as the "special operations forces of support.” They tackle high-impact, high-complexity cases that affect the entire balena fleet. Does this sound like you?

Apply today

Check out all our available job openings as well.

Events

Event name	Location	Date
Phoenix IoTDevFest	Phoenix, AZ, USA	Jan 25, 2020
The Things Conference	Amsterdam, NL	Jan 31, 2020
FOSDEM	Brussels, BE	Feb 1-2, 2020
HashiTalks	Online - Virtual Event	Feb 20, 2020
Embedded World	Nuremberg, DE	February 25-27, 2020
Scale18x	Pasadena, CA, USA	Mar 5-8, 2020
Nvidia GPU Technology Conference	San Jose, CA, USA	March 22-26, 2020
KubeCon + CloudNative, Europe	Amsterdam, NL	March 30 - April 2, 2020