02 July 2019 / Last updated: 14 Aug 2019
balena monthly roundup - July 2019
Happy Summer Solstice to the Northern Hemisphere, and happy Winter Solstice to the Southern Hemisphere. Regardless of where you are in the world and how hot or cold it is, we have some tasty treats for you this month! We’ve been busy hacking dummy security cameras, combining data from air quality sensors and setting up digital signs.
News from balenaHQ
Shaun's secrets
One of the little known secrets of the CLI is that it includes the ability to push projects with secret keys and variables that are only mounted during build. This allows one to use secret info at build time which never makes it down to your devices. You can read more about this feature in our documentation.
The latest from our blog
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. Once the main core of the application was stable, we decided to challenge ourselves and take the project down a slightly different route; turning a fake CCTV Camera into a real working CCTV Camera, where we control the software running on it 🤯.
Aggregate data from a fleet of sensors with balenaSense and InfluxDB
Back in March, we wrote about balenaSense, our project to monitor air quality with a Raspberry Pi, Grafana and InfluxDB. Lots of you have been using this project and giving great feedback, and one of the requested features was the ability to take data from multiple balenaSense devices and bring it together for monitoring centrally. We’ve updated the project to v1.5 to include this functionality, so we take a look at that here and use it as an opportunity to test the new InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 Beta!
It's a sign: build a remote-controlled digital display with Screenly OSE and Raspberry Pi
Try this project to get up and running with a display you can control remotely to display photos, videos, dashboards, web pages, and digital signage. We’ll walk you through how to set up a digital sign using balenaCloud and Screenly OSE, the most popular open-source digital signage solution for the Raspberry Pi. After implementing this project, you’ll be able to display and manage images, videos, and even live web page content on a digital sign.
Projects of the month
Every month we like to feature some projects from the community, this month it’s:
- First, we have an older post by @valexeev detailing how to set up Multi-Container with Multiple web applications which utilizes a reverse proxy allowing you to route traffic to multiple services on the same port.
- Next up, we have another project from Robert on our forums detailing the setup of a Camera streamer & player with auto discovery which works great as a baby-monitor camera!
- @rhysjtevans started putting together a community dotnet core SDK for balenaCloud.
Events
| Artificial Intelligence, Robotics & IoT conference | Amsterdam, NL | Jul 16 - 17, 2019 |
| Embedded Linux Conference | San Diego, CA, US | Aug 21 - 23, 2019 |
| Internet of Things conference | Bilbao, ES | Oct 22 - 25, 2019 |
| Hackaday Superconference | Pasadena, CA, US | Nov 15 - 17, 2019 |
by Chris Crocker-WhiteHardware Hacker turned Product guy turned co-CEO