106 posts tagged with “balena”

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balena EtcherPro Saves Jeff Geerling's Life (not literally)

Post header image What does YouTube tech star Jeff Geerling do when he needs to flash hundreds of SD cards accurately under extreme time pressure? He uses the balena EtcherPro as documented in his latest video: In this video, Jeff had to build a voting system for one of MrBeast’s shows. (In case you aren’t familiar, MrBeast is one of the most subscribed YouTubers in the world and is known for his…

September 20, 2023 / 2 min

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Remotely manage a Photovoltaic plant with an IIoT edge gateway running N3uron on balena

When we think about the word “industry”, we often envision factories bustling with robotic arms and conveyors. However, there are several other use cases within the industry where technology, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing can play critical roles in enhancing efficiency and productivity. Some of these use cases include manufacturing, supply chain, mining, city management…

June 26, 2023 / 15 min

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Refactoring Our Mission Statement

For several (transformative) years, balena’s mission has been to 'unlock the potential of physical computing by removing friction from fleet owners'. This mission served as a north star, driving our efforts to make a significant impact on the friction encountered by developers and businesses across the globe whilst working on IoT and edge computing challenges in the real world. We are incredibly…

May 17, 2023 / 3 min

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Use the MING stack to accelerate your IoT application development

Last week I received my 100W solar panel, a charge controller, and a power inverter. My goal was to get the information coming from the charge controller into a Raspberry Pi. My engineer's mind was telling me that I should create a service that could pull the data from the controller and visualize it on a nodeJS dashboard. However, some time ago the balena Ambassador, Alex Lennon, contacted me to…

May 15, 2023 / 11 min

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Scale your Industrial deployment with IIoT Edge Gateways Managed by HiveMQ and balena

Scaling an industrial IoT project across multiple sites can be a challenging task. The most repeated question we get is how to digitize a factory, followed by how to scale from one to multiple sites. Balena’s mission is to reduce the friction for device owners who need to manage massive amounts of devices. Find here how to expand your industrial deployment with IIoT edge gateways managed by…

April 18, 2023 / 15 min

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Industrial IoT Edge Gateway reference architecture using MING with HiveMQ and balena

In this blogpost, we are going to describe a reference architecture for deploying an open-source Industrial IoT edge gateway. This pretends to be a reference application that you can clone and deploy to accelerate the digitalization of your industry. With this Industrial IoT gateway running on the edge you can augment any industry and digitalize the plant floor, acquire data from multiple sources…

March 30, 2023 / 14 min

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Recent organisational changes at balena

Balena has been going through a period of change over the past year. The most notable is a change of leadership at the company with Alexandros Marinos stepping down from the role of CEO and moving into an advisory position in the company's board of directors. In his place three of us from the balena team: Chris Crocker-White, Konstaninos Mouzakis and Phil Wilson have stepped up to form the Office…

March 21, 2023 / 3 min

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Creating an IoT marketplace and launching Fleets for Good

Today we’re launching a big update to balenaHub, creating a marketplace to find and share resources for IoT building products and services. Alongside, we’re launching Fleets for Good (formerly open fleets), our way of sharing our technology to enable users who want to use our platform for a good cause. balenaHub rebrand Back in November 2020 we launched the first iteration of balenaHub. Then in…

March 01, 2023 / 5 min

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balenaCloud pricing changes and credits: let us explain

Recently, we added the ability to purchase credits for balenaCloud, and today we’re announcing changes to our pricing effective on March 8th, 2023. Let us explain these changes, our thinking behind them, and look at how they may affect you. A reminder: balenaCloud credits Last week, we launched a brand new feature to balenaCloud, allowing you to purchase credits upfront at a discount to reduce the…

February 06, 2023 / 6 min

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Save with balenaCloud by pre-purchasing device credits

Today we’re announcing a brand new feature within balenaCloud, allowing you to pre-purchase balenaCloud credits upfront, providing a discount and reducing the overall cost of running your fleet. If you can anticipate your future usage and growth on the platform, you can now pre-purchase credits (device-months) up-front, and receive a discount based on the quantity you purchase. These credits are…

February 01, 2023 / 1 min

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Meow Wolf: Running smart art exhibitions with balena

Technology has opened many doors, and the art world has taken notice. Meow Wolf is a collective of artistic creators using groundbreaking technology to create unique and breathtaking artistic experiences empowered by IoT. Meow wolf art installation using balena devices Who are Meow Wolf? Founded in 2008 in New Mexico, Meow Wolf operates interactive art experiences in Santa Fe, Denver, and Las…

January 04, 2023 / 3 min

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balena monthly roundup - September 2022

BalenaEngine is a fork from Moby Project, which deprecated the use of the aufs storage driver with the 19.03.x release series. Because of this balenaOS is also looking to deprecate the use of AUFS. Read more about this and how it might affect your devices in our latest blog. Also in this month's email: Two new IoT project tutorials Find out which events we’re attending this month New Fleets and…

September 16, 2022 / 4 min

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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. Read more about Apps and the road to multi-app on our blog. Also in this month's…

August 11, 2022 / 4 min

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balena monthly roundup - July 2022

balenaOS is now (since v2.85) available in a single unified image that can be configured at runtime for development or production mode. We’re moving on from maintaining both development and production images to reduce operational overhead as well as giving us a better understanding of how our users would manage an image in production. Instead, you can now access development mode via runtime…

July 12, 2022 / 4 min

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balena monthly roundup - June 2022

This month, balenaForums member bversluijs shared his expertise on using openbalena to manage fleets and to prototype ideas. In his blog post he teaches you how to use an external AWS S3 provider for openbalena instead of using the integrated Minio S3 container. Check out the whole tutorial here. Also in this months email: Connect a Seeed sensor to monitor your garden Bring your model railroad…

June 14, 2022 / 5 min

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Reducing friction in balena device support with our heuristic diagnostics parser

Every six months or so, our company takes a break from most of our normal activities to engage in a “Hack Week,” a week of working on a project completely outside of our day-to-day tasks. People form small teams and work on projects around a common theme, and embark on a friendly competition for bragging rights, swag, and the potential to finalize their product for the masses to use. Hack Week…

June 09, 2022 / 10 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

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Connect a Seeed Soil and Temperature sensor with your balena Helium Data-Only Hotspot on Datacake

In another blog post, we showed you how to build a Helium Data-only hotspot using balenaCloud. Here’s a way to add a practical gardening use case to the hotspot: monitoring the temperature and moisture level of plants outside (while mining a small amount of $HNT depending on the type of equipment you use!). Adding the sensors to monitor the garden One of the main problems in my garden is that the…

May 26, 2022 / 8 min

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balena monthly roundup - May 2022

Here at balena, we have noticed fleets of Helium miners and LoRaWAN gateways growing enormously over the last year. Helium is a crowdsourced LoRaWAN network running on blockchain where people personally host Helium hotspots to provide network coverage. If you don’t have yours yet, check out our blog post where we show you how to deploy a fleet of Helium data-only hotspots on Raspberry Pi and Seeed…

May 16, 2022 / 4 min

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Build your Helium Data-Only Hotspot with balena

In previous posts, we covered different ways to build a LoRaWAN gateway connected to The Things Stack (the former The Things Network (TTN)). In this post, we’ll show you how to deploy a fleet of Helium data-only hotspots on Raspberry Pi and Seeed WM1302 LoRa concentrators (SX1302). Learn how to build a Helium hotspot with balena and Seeed Helium is a crowdsourced LoRaWAN network running on…

April 22, 2022 / 9 min

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balena monthly roundup - April 2022

Any block published to balenaHub is now available to download directly as a container image, no additional registry pushes required. The balenaHub Container Registry also includes image release management and image references that you can use directly in your docker-compose files. Also in this months email: Build an autonomous vehicle (DonkeyCar!) Build an automated LED Sunlamp EtcherPro is now…

April 12, 2022 / 3 min

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Meet Sunlamp, an elegant LED automation solution using balena

There are plenty of automated LED projects on the internet, but this one is special to me as I designed and built it as part of my Labs Residency Program. I wanted it to be elegant and accessible for any maker out there. I'm excited to introduce you all to Sunlamp. Introducing Sunlamp on balena I'll talk through why I designed the Sunlamp in more details. You can also skip ahead to the tutorial…

March 24, 2022 / 10 min

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balena monthly roundup - March 2022

When you log in to the balenaCloud dashboard, you’ll see Blocks are now a primary entity. We created Blocks, drop in chunks of functionality which are common across many IoT applications, to help jumpstart your IoT app development. Now you can add and manage blocks using all of the same tools you are familiar with for managing a fleet on balenaHub. Also in this months email: Tracking your habits…

March 16, 2022 / 3 min

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How to log sensor values to Notion using balena - a basic habit and environment tracking app

We're well into 2022, and I hope you all are on track toward hitting your ambitious goals out there. I know I am. I'm keeping my momentum going by showing you all how to use the Notion API to log weather and sensor data coming in from one of my balena devices. Notion Meets Physical Computing I'll walk through a bit of why I decided to build this. If you're here for the build steps, go ahead and…

February 24, 2022 / 10 min

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How Lorenz Technology provisions and manages AI drone fleets at scale with balena

Lorenz Technology simplifies security and surveillance using a fleet of AI drones which collect, analyze, and share data in real time. Read on to see how they remove the friction from AI drone fleet maintenance and management using balena. Simplifying how they manage their AI drone fleets Lorenz Technology push boundaries of the security industry with their global fleet of AI-driven drones which…

February 23, 2022 / 2 min

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balena monthly roundup - February 2022

We’re constantly improving our dashboard to help you, our user. See the notice that tells you of a new version of the dashboard? We merge and deploy changes once they’re ready so you can benefit from improvements straight away. Check out the new changelog by clicking the version number on the bottom left corner of the dashboard to see not only what the change was but also why it was made. In this…

February 16, 2022 / 5 min

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QVNTRA leverages balena to scale Aging-in-Place IoT solution

The United States Census Bureau shows more than 54 million people were over 65 in the US on July 1 2019, and it’s projected that by 2050, that number will increase to 83.7 million. With a rapidly aging population causing an increase in demand and an ever-shrinking labor market, senior living providers are seeking to scale their resources and services through technology. QVNTRA, an emerging senior…

February 01, 2022 / 4 min

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balena monthly roundup - January 2022

Hello dear readers, This month, by popular demand, we’re teaching you how to use balenaOS with NVIDIA GPUs on an x86 device. Check out our balenaHub Challenge finalists, our latest balenaPodcast episode with ideamarket.io, and learn how to use Adafruit IO on your next balena project. As always, check out our latest balenaHub additions, community highlights, and check out the new job opportunities…

January 14, 2022 / 3 min

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balena monthly roundup - December 2021

Hello dear readers, It's time to vote for your favorite projects on balenaHub: simply join or fork interesting Fleets and Projects. Also, try adding Raspberry Pi Zero 2 Ws to your balenaCloud fleets, go behind the scenes of our balenaLabs residencies, and check out some last-minute holiday gift inspiration. As always, you can join us on the IoT Project Clinic, Fridays at 4pm UTC, to see us working…

December 15, 2021 / 4 min

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Raspberry Pi Zero 2W now supported by balenaCloud

It’s no secret that here at balena, we are huge fans of the Raspberry Pi single board computers and the ecosystem of sensors, HATs, and other add-ons that enable the small device to function as an IoT or Edge platform. balenaCloud now supports the Pi Zero 2 W So when the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2W launched a few weeks ago, we immediately set to work building our custom BalenaOS for the new device…

December 03, 2021 / 3 min

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balenaLabs Residencies: our quest to improve onboarding at balena

Onboarding is more than learning your new role and meeting teammates. It’s also about managing your own expectations, that of others, and finding a way to get as much context about your new role and company as possible. balenaLabs logo Here's how balena used the feedback and observations of new joiners to try a new way to onboard new teammates and put them on a path toward success. I remember my…

December 02, 2021 / 11 min

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balenaCloud outages: their causes and what we’re doing to resolve them

While we always work with scale in mind, our platform has recently been less reliable than our customers have come to expect during these last few months. balenaCloud has experienced an explosion of growth which has put the platform under a lot of pressure, exposing areas that require improving. We want to apologize to our customers for the impact these outages have had and explain our plan going…

November 26, 2021 / 4 min

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Build a self-hosted, voice-controlled mood tracker using Rhasspy and balena

Mood trackers keep a record of a person's mood at regular intervals. Their purpose is to help look for patterns in mood variations over time caused by different situations and circumstances. However, manually feeding data into a mood tracker can be a cumbersome task, and some people may have privacy concerns about using third-party mood tracking services. In this blog post, I’ll show how I…

November 24, 2021 / 17 min

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balena monthly roundup - November 2021

Hello dear readers,Remember, balenaHub Challenge entries (for a chance to win cash and be featured on Etcher) are due at the end of November. Good luck and have fun! Catch up with a few of our virtual workshops from the last few weeks below. From the Labs, we have a home curtain automation project and a sneak peek at a robotics-focused balenaBlock. As always, see our community highlights and open…

November 16, 2021 / 5 min

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Build one (or many) robots with balena: Introducing the tech stack and robot block

From my earliest conversations with balena, it was clear my role would be to help integrate robotics tools such as ROS (Robotic Operating System) with the balena ecosystem. I found this as the perfect excuse to start building upon a decade-long dream: an accessible robotics platform that can be used to teach, learn, and develop for years to come. Introducing the balena robot block and our approach…

November 04, 2021 / 10 min

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Improve your sleep (or other parts of your life) with automated curtains at home

While there are plenty of home automation lighting projects out there to help you automate and control LEDs, I wanted to control something physical within the home - curtains or blinds. Check out my balenaLabs residency project where I prototype a way to automate curtain or blind movement to adjust the heat and light that enters my home. Why is this important? Circadian rhythm is an important…

October 28, 2021 / 15 min

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balena monthly roundup - October 2021

Hello dear readers,We’re all fresh from our annual Summit 2021, so we have all kinds of new ideas and energy to bring into the rest of this year and into the new one. We hope to see you at our Virtual Hackathon coming up this month. Also, check out our new competition that features some great prizes up for grabs. We’re also extremely excited that the first EtcherPros have been shipped!As always…

October 14, 2021 / 5 min

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How to use BLE to communicate between an Arduino running Edge Impulse and a Pi running balenaOS

In this post, we’ll look at how Edge Impulse and balena work together and what led me down the path to improvise a solution using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) so the two could communicate with each other. Illustration of Edge Impulse and balena project I’ve been fascinated by the work of Edge Impulse, which is a platform that allows devices such as microcontrollers and single board computers to…

September 30, 2021 / 7 min

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How I built a video game prototype with custom hardware and balena

I’ve been wanting to make this alternative controller game for a while and found the perfect opportunity to do so at balena. Read on to learn about my idea, how I used balena to prototype my project, and what next steps I’ll take to bring this edge project to life. Animated GIF of project My game is about an ancient spirit trapped inside of an ornate brick. The picture below shows some concept art…

September 27, 2021 / 11 min

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balenaPodcast episode 04: Better orgs for the future, applying systems thinking, and what's next for Agile and Lean

Software Development Coach, Chris R. Chapman, joins the balenaPodcast to talk about what next-gen engineering leaders need to build better organizations. Chapman discusses why systems thinking is critical for any new leader, as well as applying psychology and empathy into the mix. He reminds us of the management thinking of luminaries like Deming, Ackoff, Taguchi, and more, while encouraging new…

September 22, 2021 / 93 min

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balena monthly roundup - September 2021

Hello dear readers, This month, we inspire you to build. Check out this tutorial on creating your own balenaBlocks and see new Projects and Fleets on balenaHub, including a citizen science project encouraging you to build your own environment sensor. Our ambassadors also share what they have been building this summer and there are new build logs on the balenaForums. There's a new episode of the…

September 13, 2021 / 4 min

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balena monthly roundup - August 2021

Hello dear readers, You may have already noticed on balenaCloud that Applications are now known as Fleets. Learn more about why we made this change and what’s next for our product on our announcement post. Also check out our latest balenaPodcast episode on bringing industrial manufacturing capability to the masses, a tutorial on how to run edge AI with OpenVINO on balena, and, as always…

August 12, 2021 / 4 min

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balena monthly roundup - July 2021

Hello, dear readers, First off, we’re thankful for the adoption of open fleets on balenaHub! Keep on adding devices to open fleets or creating your own fleets-- all the feedback helps us improve balenaHub for everyone. This month, hear the balena origin story from our Founder, and check out the freshly updated balenaSense v2. On the IoT Happy Hour, learn more about Helium, and how to move your…

July 14, 2021 / 4 min

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balenaSense v2: Updated temperature, pressure, and humidity monitoring for Raspberry Pi

Welcome to version 2.0 of balenaSense, featuring a number of radical changes that rendered previous guides somewhat outdated. Using an outdated guide is no fun, so, we present a new project tutorial for balenaSense v2. balenaSense was designed to make it easy to take temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and other readings from sensors and provide a dashboard to see this information at a…

July 09, 2021 / 17 min

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balena monthly roundup - June 2021

Hello, dear readers! We’re pretty excited about launching Open Fleets, which now have over 400 users across a number of fleet anyone can try. Available on Spotify and other major podcast apps, we launched the first episode of our balenaPodcast series. You can also learn more ways to get involved in the balena community, see some interesting community-built projects, and find a few new job postings…

June 14, 2021 / 4 min

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balena monthly roundup - May 2021

Hello, dear readers! It’s been a busy month here at balena! Our 5th Release Party led to some changes to the look and feel of balenaCloud to help new users build their first project. We also explored why we created the audio, sensor, and pulse blocks to inspire edge developers to try them out or build their own. As always, check out this month’s community spotlights, job openings this month, and…

May 11, 2021 / 4 min

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balena monthly roundup - April 2021

Hello, dear readers! This month we are introducing you to the first group of balena Ambassadors. We also held a Release Party that focused on getting the team together to improve our balenaCloud docs. Check out this month’s community spotlights, some new blocks on balenaHub, and see our two new job openings this month! Read on for more details. News from balenaHQ Introducing the balena Ambassador…

April 12, 2021 / 4 min

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Release Party: Improving balenaCloud Docs

This Release Party featured balenistas banding together to improve the balenaCloud documentation. We explored how our team or the community could contribute to the docs, and made a little contest out of it while learning a few things along the way. Release Party 4 was all about improving documentation What’s a release party? Our team gets together every once in a while to sprint on releasing a new…

April 02, 2021 / 5 min

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balena monthly roundup - March 2021

Hello, dear readers! This month we launched Offline Updates: update balenafied devices that are in areas where internet connectivity is limited. By popular demand, we also put together a guide on how to set up Datadog’s IoT Agent with balenaCloud to monitor fleet metrics. As always, we have a number of community spotlights, new apps on balenaHub, and are looking for new teammates to join balena…

March 11, 2021 / 4 min

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Introducing the balena Ambassador Program

This March we are kicking off our Ambassador Program. We’ve invited six outstanding members of the balena community to join us to learn more about building with balena and to encourage other community members to do the same. Here’s an overview of the program and an introduction to our first class of ambassadors. What is the balena Ambassador Program? At balena we focus on being product and user…

March 08, 2021 / 4 min

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Offline Updates make it easier to update balena devices without the internet

Many balenaCloud users enjoy the seamless integration between their connected IoT devices and our tools that make device monitoring, managing, and updating easy. However, what if your devices have limited connectivity by design? Introducing Offline Updates: a process that lets you to preload and reflash a device so it retains its unique balena identity, apps, and configurations-- all without a…

February 09, 2021 / 6 min

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balena monthly roundup - February 2021

Hello, dear readers! This month we’re (re)introducing balenaBlocks with a new home on balenaHub and a live demo. If you’re interested in finding new IoT or edge projects to try, want to submit your own app, or find balenaBlocks to build with, you’ll find them all on balenaHub. From the lab, learn the basics about automated plant watering with balenaPlant. Try the project out to see the connector…

February 08, 2021 / 4 min

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Keep your plant-friends happy and healthy with automated watering: balenaPlant

Even when you remember to water your plants, did you water too much? Not enough? This project combines a Raspberry Pi, balenaBlocks, environmental sensors, and water pump automation to help keep your plants watered with a data-driven touch. Meet balenaPlant Access a dashboard showing your plant data from anywhere in the world using balenaCloud. Add new plant monitors quickly and easily using the…

January 27, 2021 / 10 min

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Introducing the new balenaCloud sidebar

During balena's Release Party 3, our team designed and deployed a new sidebar on balenaCloud in less than eight hours. This includes improvement of the menu experience and innovative breadcrumbs. Thanks to every teammate who contributed to redesign the sidebar. Better navigation for better fleet management We’ve been looking to update the balenaCloud dashboard menu for some time to make it more…

December 22, 2020 / 2 min

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Balena introduces new collaboration and organization management features

We’ve been thinking a lot about how companies and teams work together on balenaCloud, and wanted to make it easier to collaborate without sacrificing control or security. The result of our work is a new top-level feature called Organizations. Start using Organizations in balenaCloud today With this release, Organizations become central to device, application and user management across our platform…

December 17, 2020 / 4 min

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balena monthly roundup - December 2020

Hello, readers! We’re excited to announce balenaHub: find and deploy ready-made edge and IoT projects made by product builders like you, or share your own app with the world. Try it out! From the lab, we show educators how to set up a Scratch server on a Raspberry Pi, and introduce AI-driven audio analysis using Coral and balena. We also took a deep look at the networking features of balenaFin…

December 09, 2020 / 6 min

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Introducing balenaHub: an easier way to find and publish apps and projects for edge devices

Now you can find IoT and edge projects created by other product builders, like you. Simply go to balenaHub, find a project that you want to try, add your devices, and begin. We're excited to announce balenaHub! We built this feature as part of our second Release Party. Massive thanks for every teammate who contributed to launching this next exciting step of how we share and build IoT and edge…

November 25, 2020 / 4 min

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Build a Scratch server using a Raspberry Pi and balena

Ever wonder what an 8-year-old child would build if you taught them balena? Building their very own Scratch server is at the top of the list. All it took was some encouragement, a Raspberry Pi, and some simple steps. For parents and educators who want to start quickly, our tried-and-true guide steps are available here. Or read on to enjoy the tale of an eight year old boy and his quest to build…

November 19, 2020 / 8 min

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balena monthly roundup - November 2020

Hello there, readers! We’re proud to share how we help Infarm build the gardens of the future. Imagine that: deploy thousands of IoT microfarms to bring better produce to stores and restaurants. From the lab, we’re showing people how to build a solar-powered LoRa weather station and how to send and receive station data between their gateway and balena device. If you’re interested in adding…

November 11, 2020 / 5 min

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Analyze sounds using Coral AI on the edge and fleet intelligence, Part 1

Can we use AI to help us identify and quantify noise pollution? In this project, we’re using a Coral Dev Board or a Raspberry Pi 4 with an attached Edge TPU to listen to ambient sounds 24/7 and categorize them for us. Use AI to identify and quantify sounds with Coral + balena We’ll also demonstrate how we could deploy a fleet of these devices (e.g. across an entire city) and feed new information…

October 22, 2020 / 14 min

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balena monthly roundup - October 2020

Hello there, readers! We’re energized and inspired after this year’s remote 2020 Summit event! Also, did you know that we built a feature in a day? Try out high-level device metrics in the dashboard. Fresh from the lab are guides on starting your own local AI project using Edge Impulse, and how to add Deploy with balena to your next IoT project to improve how other users adopt and share it. As…

October 13, 2020 / 5 min

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How we ran a virtual summit for 100 people

Here at balena, our annual teamwide Summit is the banner event in our calendar year. As a globally distributed team, Summit is when we bring everybody together to build deeper relationships, reflect on how we work, and align on our vision for the future. Past Summits have been held in cities such as Athens and Barcelona and involved flying people from 30+ countries to a single location for a week…

October 06, 2020 / 7 min

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Infarm uses balena to make farm-to-table work

Sustainably feeding the planet is at the heart of the farm-to-table movement and the motivation behind a new breed of tech companies working to make locally grown herbs and vegetables commercially viable. Balena is there to help. For Berlin-based Farm-as-a-Service company Infarm, the answer to food-to-table farming is remote-controlled microfarms that use edge technology to optimize growing…

September 22, 2020 / 5 min

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How to classify socks using a Raspberry Pi, Edge Impulse, and balena

We’re going to create a project on a Raspberry Pi with a Camera that distinguishes between socks using the Edge Impulse Machine Learning system running on balena. We all know that matching socks is a nightmare, so having an affordable, intelligent system saying if a sock matches with another sock is the best weekend project ever. Use AI on a Raspberry Pi with Edge Impulse and balena to determine…

September 14, 2020 / 11 min

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balena monthly roundup - September 2020

By popular demand, we created a guide on how to run Wireguard VPN in balenaOS. Our team also got to the bottom of USB temperature issues on the Fin v1.1. From the lab, we showed edge developers, hackers, and makers how to build an IoT surveillance camera in 30 minutes, and how to get started with BLE (Bluetooth low-energy) item trackers. We learned how one balenista improved their IoT app…

September 09, 2020 / 5 min

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'Deploy with balena' makes it easier to deploy and share IoT apps

Have you ever shared an open source IoT project only to be overwhelmed with questions about how to deploy it, or underwhelmed with the lack of adoption by the community? Even if you labor over your README instructions, it can be hard to make device provisioning and deployments simple and repeatable. Streamline how you deploy your IoT application Our new Deploy with balena capability lets you…

September 03, 2020 / 5 min

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Introducing lightweight high-level device metrics in balenaCloud

Now you can surface and view device performance metrics on the balenaCloud dashboard. This is a lightweight way to get a high-level summary of CPU, RAM, and storage utilization, CPU temperature, undervoltage warnings, and other important metrics on every device within your fleet. This device metric summary is now available in balenaCloud without any extra work. For our advanced users, access this…

September 03, 2020 / 3 min

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How my cat helped me build a better IoT app

Modernizing my app made it far easier to spy on my American Shorthair. My cat Tucker is a somewhat predictable animal who likes to curl up in predictable spots around the house, so he’s the perfect subject for surreptitious video surveillance and just the sort of motivating force I needed to rework a Raspberry Pi project I’d been putting off for some time. I’d previously set up video surveillance…

August 18, 2020 / 13 min

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Make a security camera system in 30 minutes or less

Use a single-board computer or spare laptop, a webcam and free software to build your own surveillance system. There are many reasons for wanting security cameras: watching blind spots around your home, keeping a remote eye on your children playing, or finding where the delivery person lobbed your package. In fact, I have all of these reasons and more, so I set out to see how easy it would be for…

August 13, 2020 / 7 min

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balena monthly roundup - August 2020

This month we’re excited about partnering with Coral to help developers bring their local AI projects to life. We made a bit of a splash with the Steampunk Geiger Counter project, presented a simple way to start up a LoRa network with Basics Station, and helped users fix those corrupted USB or SD card drives. From the community, we’re happy to spotlight this project guide on using balenaOS to…

August 05, 2020 / 5 min

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How to run Wireguard VPN in balenaOS

This guide will teach you how to run Wireguard VPN using balenaOS. Wireguard is a simple, modern, and fast VPN solution that suits balenaOS and balenaCloud use cases well. We created this guide to address some user questions that we’ve received a few times on our forums. As with any solution at balena, it’s continuously improving to help our users with the various ways they put balena to work…

July 24, 2020 / 7 min

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Etcher broke my USB stick … or did it?

We put USB sticks and SD cards through a lot of work (and abuse), and sometimes it leaves them in a state where they’re unreadable. Learn how to determine if this happens to your tiny data drive and get some tips on how to make it usable again. Let's try and restore and repair that USB drive or SD card! As you can probably guess by the types of projects we build and the contents of our blog posts…

July 22, 2020 / 6 min

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Rapid prototyping a GPS tracker with balenaOS: a community perspective

Our guest community author, Xabier Crespo of SC Robotics, walks through a GPS project that uses Docker and balenaOS, written in Python. Learn more about their prototyping process using balenaOS and try the project. My name is Xabier Crespo and I’m a co-founder at SC Robotics, a small consulting firm which develops electronics and embedded systems. We work on a lot of IoT (and IIoT) projects and…

July 08, 2020 / 14 min

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Balena partners with Coral to enable AI at the edge

Today we’re announcing that balena and Coral are partnering to simplify how developers deploy and manage AI applications at the edge. Coral is a platform of hardware components, software tools, and example models for building devices with local AI. Coral's on-device ML acceleration technology helps developers build fast, efficient, and affordable solutions for the edge. Balena helps developers…

July 07, 2020 / 3 min

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balena monthly roundup - July 2020

This month we’re excited to share some news about Rosetta@home. The research team has found proteins that potentially neutralize COVID-19 in lab tests. Thanks to everyone for your continued help here via Fold for Covid! Looking for a summer project? If you want to try AI at the edge, try OpenDataCam, or if you want a beautiful way to share quotes and messages with others, check out InkyShot. As…

July 06, 2020 / 3 min

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Build a simple radiation monitor using a Raspberry Pi, InfluxDB and Grafana

We wrote in detail about our Raspberry Pi geiger counter project in another post, now this guide focuses on the basics necessary to build your own. Read on to discover how to assemble a background radiation monitor with a web dashboard to show pretty graphs (who doesn’t like pretty graphs?!). Introduction We build and feature projects that monitor the environment around them quite frequently at…

July 06, 2020 / 6 min

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Show & tell: a steampunk desktop background radiation monitor

I was always a fan of the steampunk style, and having also had experience building steam engines in the past, there was only one real direction this project could go. Once I had my radiation detector kit hooked up to my Raspberry Pi running InfluxDB and Grafana, I found myself woodworking, machining, and fabricobbling an enclosure out of mahogany, brass, copper, toggle switches and, because it…

July 01, 2020 / 15 min

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Using OpenDataCam and balena to "quantify the world" with AI

Learn how to run OpenDataCam on balenaCloud, which adds a number of features to make managing a device (or a fleet of dozens) easy. This guide features deployment, remote configuration, how to use the built-in VPN, a public URL, and monitoring device diagnostics. What is OpenDataCam? OpenDataCam is an open source project, by move Lab, that tracks moving objects with live video analysis using CUDA…

June 19, 2020 / 12 min

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Send personal messages and inspirational quotes with this e-ink display project

Introducing Inkyshot: an inspirational e-ink display delivering a daily shot of encouragement through a quote or personalized message for you or your loved ones. Based on a Raspberry Pi Zero and e-ink display, Inkyshot is a perfect weekend project whether you’re completely new to IoT or an experienced developer. Introducing Inkyshot Follow this guide to build your own Inkyshot for yourself or…

June 08, 2020 / 8 min

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balena monthly roundup - June 2020

Hey there balena fans! We have a few important product updates to catch you up on this month-- a new deprecation policy for the SDK and CLI, and rolling out delta updates for the host OS to make fleet updates more efficient. For the tinkerers out there, we have new projects like our wireless printing project, our skin temperature sensor, and Wi-Fi repeater. As always, we have a few community…

June 08, 2020 / 6 min

tutorial

Turn a Raspberry Pi into a Wi-Fi access point or repeater

Remote work brings more opportunity to tackle projects from different parts of the home. However, without strong enough Wi-Fi strength, your productivity might sink. Use this project to create a Wi-Fi access point or repeater out of a Raspberry Pi so you can improve signal coverage while working from home or remotely on the road. Extend Wi-Fi coverage with this project In today’s modern life…

May 18, 2020 / 10 min

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Deprecation of Python 2 base images in balenalib

As of January 1st, 2020, the Python Software Foundation announced the sunsetting of the Python 2. This means that from that date there will be no further improvements, even if someone were to identify a security risk. Their very strong recommendation is to upgrade to Python 3 as soon as you can. In light of this, we are announcing the deprecation of our Python 2 base images in balenalib. When are…

May 12, 2020 / 1 min

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balena monthly roundup - May 2020

Hey there, everyone! In case you missed it, we launched Fold for Covid-- an easy way to contribute your spare computing power (PCs, laptops, single-board devices) to Rosetta@home and support vital COVID-19 research. Check it out and #jointhefold! For the tinkerers out there, we launched an LED Alerter project to help prevent office intrusions or interruptions during remote work. We added a few new…

May 06, 2020 / 7 min

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Check yourself for a fever with this DIY thermal scanner

Many people all over the world do not have immediate and easy access to health care. For some, that means thinking of creative ways of contributing toward taking better care of ourselves and improving response times to reacting to potential illness, like via this handheld, personal body temperature detector. Build a device to check your own skin temperature GitHub user Gilbert François created a…

May 05, 2020 / 7 min

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Put friends and loved ones on the big screen with this instant video call project

Maybe you know someone who doesn’t know their Hangouts from their Skype, or who doesn’t have any internet connected devices at all, but would love to see you on a video call. How about connecting a TV and webcam to a Raspberry Pi and turning it into a video window you can remotely administer? Let’s go! For some households, having the whole family crowd round a tablet to video call friends or…

April 29, 2020 / 10 min

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Balena enables more devices to join Rosetta@Home to research COVID-19

Editor's Note: Today the Balena team announced the Fold for Covid project, a simple way for anyone to contribute spare compute power from home to support research of COVID-19 treatments. For more background on how and why we created the project, here’s our Developer Advocate, David Tischler. Like many folks, I have been preoccupied with finding a way to help combat the global coronavirus pandemic…

April 16, 2020 / 6 min

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WiFi-enable USB printers with a Raspberry Pi and share it over your network

Do you have a printer that only connects using USB? Wish you could print from your phone, tablet or a computer from another room? Turn a Pi into an AirPrint-friendly printer server! Turn a Pi into an AirPrint-friendly printer server! This guide will walk you through setting up and sharing your printer using a Raspberry Pi so you can print wirelessly from any device in your home network. Before you…

April 14, 2020 / 11 min

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New to working remotely? Here are some tips from our global fully-distributed team

Recent events have caused companies to enforce remote work policies, surprising many people around the world who might be used to going into the office. While it might seem easy to accomplish on paper, remote work comes with its own set of challenges. We embrace the remote work lifestyle at balena As a fully-distributed company, balena proudly nurtures a strong remote work culture that creates a…

March 18, 2020 / 6 min

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Local Mode and livepush make balenaCloud app development faster

Editor's Note, 25 March 2021: Edge developers can now access balenaBlocks pre-built containerized services ready to drop into new applications. Check them out on balenaHub. Developing containerized applications can be time-consuming, particularly when they have multiple services and you want to ensure they run properly on different platforms and IoT devices. With balenaCloud Local Mode and…

March 13, 2020 / 7 min

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Build an AI-driven object detection algorithm with balenaOS and alwaysAI

This guide will show you how to set up a neural network model that runs an object detection algorithm in real time. We’ll be leveraging balenaOS and alwaysAI’s platform to greatly simplify the process. In this guide we build a an AI-driven neural network model running object detection using balena and alwaysAI Some prep work In a previous article, we showed you how to easily get started with…

March 12, 2020 / 10 min

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balena monthly roundup - March 2020

Welcome dear reader-- we hope you’re having a marvellous day! This month, we’re excited to announce that we’ve released our Extended Support Release (ESR) process for balenaCloud. This is a massive step forward for fleet owners running projects on thousands of devices at scale using balenaCloud, giving you all a more predictable release schedule. On the blog this month, we’ve been working with the…

March 09, 2020 / 4 min

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Get started with computer vision and machine learning using balenaOS and alwaysAI

We’ll show you a simplified overview of computer vision and deep learning, and the easiest way to get started using balenaOS and alwaysAI. This guide combines the powers of balena with alwaysAI’s platform to get a project up and running quickly on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano. Go from “zero” to “AI hero” in just a blog post! Get started with computer vision and deep learning with balenaOS and alwaysAI…

March 03, 2020 / 11 min

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Getting Started with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano using balena

UPDATED 11 Jan 2023: Note that as of 11 January 2023, we have an updated guide here with a more streamlined method to accomplish the examples in this post, as well as more background information about using NVIDIA Jetson devices with balena. When you’re building applications to run on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, you’ll often have a list of underlying libraries and dependencies such as CUDA, OpenCV…

February 26, 2020 / 7 min

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Skycatch: navigating at-scale fleet management challenges using balena

Skycatch relies on balena to operate thousands of drones and edge devices that digitally image, process, and map industrial job sites. Learn how balena helps them remove the friction of at-scale device and fleet management so they can focus on serving customers and improve their unique GNSS and imagery platform. About Skycatch Skycatch provides a platform to companies, like Skansa and Komatsu, to…

February 25, 2020 / 3 min

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balena monthly roundup - February 2020

We hope 2020 is off to a great start! This month we’re talking Container Contracts, Software-Defined Radio (SDR), and figuring out how to get the most from our edge devices. “By the beard of Zeus-- what’s a container contract?!” we hear you cry, but fear not-- we cover the feature in this blog post on how to make conditional updates to your fleet. If you’re curious about SDR, check out this guide…

February 05, 2020 / 5 min

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Control your devices from a web browser using Bluetooth

Here’s how to use the Web Bluetooth API and balena to control Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices remotely from a browser. This guide shows you how to build a simple LED setup that you can switch on and off from a web browser. We’ll also dive into how this works and how it can drive other awesome ideas. Build a simple LED setup that you can switch on and off from a web browser with balena. In this…

February 04, 2020 / 10 min

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How to create a Minecraft Server for the Raspberry Pi 4 with balena

This project and guide is a community contribution by Alex K., aka AlexProgrammerDE. Check out his GitHub page, his GitHub repository, and give a Star. Enjoy the guide. If you want to host your own Minecraft Server -- all from a Raspberry Pi -- this project is for you! Try the balena Minecraft Server, a starter project to quickly and easily create a Minecraft Server and use SCP and RCON to manage…

January 31, 2020 / 11 min

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Are you buying the right devices for your IoT workloads?

There was a time when IoT devices were merely low-powered boards capable of doing a single chore, albeit in far-flung locales. Today, boards like the balenaFin, Raspberry Pi 3 and 4, and NVIDIA are powerful multi-core microcomputers with plenty of horsepower to spare. How do you decide which is best for your application? How do you know which device you need to fit your IoT workload? The capacity…

January 24, 2020 / 9 min

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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…

January 14, 2020 / 5 min

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balena monthly roundup - December 2019

Greetings to thee, faithful reader! We bring ye good tidings in the final balena newsletter of 2019! This month brings product news for fleet owners, the latest from our blog, and as always, the latest from you out in the community. Of particular interest this month is our Bosch case study, where you can read how this multinational engineering and electronics company uses balena to deploy software…

December 09, 2019 / 6 min

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How Bosch remotely manages and deploys to IoT devices at scale with balena

Learn how Bosch uses balena as part of their IoT fleet management and devops solutions. Bosch is a world leading multinational engineering and electronics company who invests heavily in IoT; developing innovative solutions for smart homes, cities and manufacturing. Part of this research and development is looking for new business approaches in the context of industrial IoT, and in one such…

November 19, 2019 / 2 min

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Device diagnostics are now open-source!

Following our announcement earlier this year, where we unveiled the new experimental diagnostics features, today we are happy to announce that on-device diagnostics are now also open-source. In addition to helping us solicit feedback more effectively, one of the main reasons for doing this is to offer our users even more transparency in terms of what occurs on-device. What changed? Based on the…

November 09, 2019 / 1 min

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All good things come to an end.... (Including balenaOS 1.x)

In the fall of 2016, we released balenaOS 2.0 (then known as resinOS) 2.0 out into the world. Since then we’ve worked hard to incorporate our learnings from the field and continually improve balenaOS. In the last two years, we’ve increased the number of supported device types by over 3x, added the much-anticipated support for running multiple containers on devices, improved filesystem resilience…

April 10, 2019 / 1 min

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How we develop balenaCloud, using balenaCloud

In this post, we'll show you how we use our own platform to build our infrastructure and provide our engineering team with a reliable development environment. Find out how we optimised and refined the configuration of our software stack so the entire balenaCloud platform can run on balenaCloud and even on the balenaFin. Project BoB - Meta-Platforming Ourselves About a year ago, I was chatting with…

March 28, 2019 / 12 min

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Balena releases 26k new container base images optimized for IoT and Edge Computing

Sometimes combinatorial explosion is your friend. Today we are proud to announce the release of over 26,000 new base images under the balenalib namespace over on DockerHub. Over the last 4 years we've been maintaining and nurturing the most comprehensive set of base images for deploying containers on the edge. We've learned a lot by watching and listening to and supporting our users, such as how…

January 01, 2019 / 5 min

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Happy anniversary, team balena!

This Friday, November 9th 2018, marks 5 years since we first successfully ran Docker on a Raspberry Pi. This was a huge breakthrough in the world of edge computing. For the first time, we could use containers to run applications on what was, and has become even more so, the most ubiquitous, widely supported and easily accessible IoT device on the market. This breakthrough was a catalyst for us to…

November 08, 2018 / 3 min