6 posts tagged with “balenaLabs residency”

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Enabling deep sleep for your Raspberry Pi project

Single board computers (SBCs) are awesome, small, low-power devices, often with wireless connectivity, which makes them ideal for simple battery operated projects. However, when calculating your energy budget, you often come to realize they are not quite low power enough to accommodate small batteries running over a long time (multiple days/months). We often don't need full-time availability, so…

September 20, 2022 / 12 min

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Mastodon on balena

What Mastodon is a popular open-source microblogging platform. It uses the Activity Pub specification to implement the federation. In practice, it means that one can subscribe and interact with users from external servers and see activity across the network. Why Setting up your own Mastodon server from scratch requires some effort. At a minimum, you'll need your own domain, mail service account…

September 20, 2022 / 7 min

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Help your dog (or cat!) communicate with buttons using balena

My work from home co-pilot is an adorable Corgi mix named Brigitte. She is great for reducing stress and generally improving quality of life while working, but she has her own needs too. And when I’m absorbed with a task, it can be easy to forget that. But to my defense, she isn’t the best communicator. Brigitte is a quiet dog, which means when she needs to go outside to relieve herself, she often…

September 12, 2022 / 10 min

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Build You Own Voice Assistant – A balenaLabs Residency project

Voice Assistants represent an entirely different way of how we can interact with machines. In the past few years, Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa have revolutionized the entire field, however, all these devices work "online" meaning that they send your voice commands to a server in the cloud, where this data is stored for further improvements on their voice recognition models. If you, like many…

August 29, 2022 / 8 min

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Visualize and analyze radio waves with RTL Power – A balenaLabs Residency project

This project, as part of my balenaLabs residency, combines RTL Power, a project to visualize and analyze signal frequency bands in a simpler and general way. This uses a Software Defined Radio (SDR), rtl_power and balena! actual-dashboard-full-2 actual-heatmap1-full Why did I create this project? Common wireless systems rely on some form of radio waves. These waves are differentiated by frequency…

July 19, 2022 / 8 min

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Bring your model railroad to life with LED, movement, and sound automation using balena

Many model railroad enthusiasts have basements filled with photo-realistic layouts or join clubs with amazing cities and yards. I’m not an enthusiast, but a few years ago I pulled out an old Lionel set I had as a kid and thought a new paint job could make it look less plasticy. I’ve never built a layout (nor would I have room for a large one) but occasionally I’d send a train around a loop or…

June 07, 2022 / 13 min