balenaFin has reached end of life

Our mission has always centered around removing sources of friction for our customers. Back in 2018, we recognized a void in the market for a hardware device that could support our customers' scaling ambitions. That's why, in 2018, we announced the balenaFin - a carrier board that could run all the software that the Raspberry Pi could, but was more robust for field deployment use cases and came equipped with the additional hardware features our users needed most. Since then we have shipped more than 10,000 balenaFin devices to customers all around the world. We’ve seen customers take it to amazing places and build awesome businesses on top of it.

Due to the ongoing events of the supply chain crisis, 2022 saw significant delays for the manufacture of balenaFin carrier boards. We were unable to secure a supply chain for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, causing significant issues for both our production and customers. In addition to this, after a design revision to accommodate the supply chain disruption, and a move to a new manufacturing partner, we were still unable to reliably manufacture the new balenaFin carrier boards.

Given these challenges, we have taken the decision to stop manufacturing the balenaFin, and bring forward our long-term intention to distribute the balenaFin design files under a permissive license.

Our aim is now to focus on supporting our balenaFin customers in their transition. Releasing the balenaFin design enables our customers to consider their own manufacturing options. The design represents exactly what we manufactured and most recently sold as the balenaFin, as well as changes we have made in the meantime. Note however the design will be released “as-is”, and we cannot guarantee the current manufacturability of the design or provide support on specific manufacturing issues.

The design files are available now, at https://github.com/balena-io-hardware/fin-mainBoard-pcb

As per our policy of producing new balenaOS releases for hardware discontinued by the vendor, there will be no further balenaOS releases. The latest and final release is v2.115.7+rev1. BalenaFin fleets will receive a “discontinued” tag in the dashboard, but will operate as they have been, with the exception that no further OS releases will take place.

We will continue to offer support to balenaFin users for 2 years from .

Balena will also be available to help customers transition to new hardware. If you would like to reach out to us, if you have a balenaFin order in place already, or you have any concerns related to your hardware needs, please send us an email at [email protected].