Balena.io Blog

September 16, 2022 / 4 min

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…

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

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

Partnering with RPI graduate students to explore customer projection models

Over the past semester, we’ve worked with students studying business analytics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to build customer projections. Genadi Naydenov (my fellow data-focused balenista) and I partnered with RPI’s Lally School of Management in their Supply Chain Capstone course. Professor T. Ravichandran, teaches the course and mentored the student team in this project…

July 01, 2022 / 2 min

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

How to use an external AWS S3 provider for openbalena

EDITOR’S NOTE: We welcome this community contribution by Bart Versluijs, also known as bversluijs on the balenaForums. As a constant contributor and prototyper using openbalena, we couldn’t help but have him share some build tips and tricks. In this post, we’ll be connecting an external AWS S3 provider to openBalena, instead of using the integrated Minio S3 container. How to use AWS S3 external…

June 01, 2022 / 7 min

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

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

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

February 16, 2022 / 5 min

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…

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

balenaHub Challenge 2021 - Introducing the Finalists

The balenaHub Challenge was open for entries in October and November 2021, and throughout December Hub users have been ‘voting with their Fleet’ by joining the new Fleets and trying out Projects. Here are your balenaHub Challenge 2021 finalists The top five most popular Projects and top five Fleets have made it through to judging. Read on to check them out. What is the balenaHub Challenge? Last…

January 07, 2022 / 7 min

December 15, 2021 / 4 min

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 08, 2021 / 14 min

Holiday gift suggestions for the hardware hackers in your life - 2021 edition

The holidays are coming up! If you, like me, are not an engineer but have a lot of them in your life, here are a few ideas crowdsourced for the balena team to inspire your holiday shopping this year. Gear & Tools Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Here's a Raspberry Pi The brand new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is on every developer's wish list right now. It’s just as small as the original Pi Zero but five times as…

November 16, 2021 / 5 min

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…

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

September 22, 2021 / 93 min

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 13, 2021 / 4 min

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…

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

August 10, 2021 / 118 min

balenaPodcast episode 02: Bringing industrial-level 3D printing capability to the masses

For our second episode of the balenaPodcast, we spoke with Dival Banerjee (Vuecason) and Matt Parlmer (GenFab), two 3D printer entrepreneurs on their own missions to bring industrial-level manufacturing capability to everyone. Check out the two-part episode. Here's Part 1: Here's Part 2: You can also listen to the episode on your favorite podcast app: Spotify Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Please…

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

Introducing balenaPodcast, an interview with Eben Upton, Founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation

Pretty exciting news here: we launched a podcast! We had the opportunity to record a one-on-one chat with Alexandros Marinos, balena Founder and CEO, and Eben Upton, Founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation for our very first episode. The two talked shop about how hardware manufacturers manage the global component shortage, the future of RISC-V, and how manufacturers aren’t paranoid enough (about…

June 23, 2021 / 47 min

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

Five ways you can contribute to the balena community

Calling all balenaCloud and openbalena users-- we’d love to hear from you and see what amazing things you’re doing with the platform. Learn five ways you can contribute to the balena community, share your work with the world, and get some cool swag while you’re at it. Why should you contribute? We’re always on the lookout for community members who do amazing things with balena, like create edge…

June 09, 2021 / 5 min

Introducing Open Fleets and self-submitted apps and blocks on balenaHub

We are excited to introduce open fleets on balenaHub. Now any ambitious edge developer can create an Open Fleet, Project, or balenaBlock, self-submit it to balenaHub, and share it with the entire world. We launched these changes as part of a Release Party. Now anyone can contribute edge and IoT apps to balenaHub or join an open fleet to add a device to an interesting project. What’s a release…

May 13, 2021 / 7 min

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

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

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

February 08, 2021 / 4 min

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…

balena monthly roundup - January 2021

Happy new year, dear readers! Let’s kick off the new year with some exciting news-- EtcherPro pre-orders are now open. Use it to flash up to 16 SD cards, USB sticks, or devices at once, without a computer. Order yours today. We added a few improvements to balenaCloud as well: check out our recently-added Organizations feature and updated sidebar navigation. The easier you can manage your teams and…

January 08, 2021 / 6 min

December 09, 2020 / 6 min

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…

November 27, 2020 / 8 min

Holiday gift suggestions for the hardware hackers in your life

With the holidays right around the corner, I asked my balena colleagues to suggest gift ideas for the tech-minded people in their lives -- and yours -- and they came up with some interesting stuff. Some of these things you might want for yourself, so consider it a list for giving and receiving, which I’ve broken down into three categories: gear, tools, and books. This list is by no means…

November 25, 2020 / 4 min

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 11, 2020 / 5 min

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…

September 09, 2020 / 5 min

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

balena monthly roundup - April 2020

Let’s start by sharing some of the amazing work balena customers are doing to improve accessibility to home testing for COVID-19, advance disease research tools, and increase access to medical equipment. We also asked our own team of experts at balena (we’re 100% remote) directly for work-from-home tips to help those who can’t commute to their offices. Team balena is grateful, proud, and…

April 01, 2020 / 5 min

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

IoT professionals: define your role

If you’re like most IoT professionals, you’re something of a jack-of-all-trades who’s part full-stack engineer, edge developer, hardware specialist, network guru, data analyst, and visionary all rolled into one. But what do you call yourself? Just as “system administrator” doesn’t really tell the whole story anymore, modern alternatives like “DevOps Engineer” or “Cloud Architect” or “Security…

March 17, 2020 / 1 min

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

January 31, 2020 / 11 min

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…

Beyond the cloud: Docker containers in space

On the 13th June 2019, a rocket launched from Kiruna, Sweden, carrying 280kg of scientific experiments; among them, a Raspberry Pi Zero running Docker containers on balenaOS. To our knowledge this is the first time a Moby/Docker container engine has been flown to space! Nico Maas, an IT Engineer & Ground Controller from the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt (the German Aerospace Center…

October 09, 2019 / 4 min

Deploy a fleet of environmental sensors with balena & InfluxDB

Last month Alex Markessinis released a very nice project based on balenaSense to manage the temperature and humidity of a data center and upload the data to an external InfluxDB database. Follow along as we go through the process of setting up this project to capture data from remote sensors and send the data to a central InfluxDB database with the help of a Raspberry Pi and balenaCloud. Hardware…

May 13, 2019 / 6 min

Cellular connectivity with resinOS 2.0, 3G dongles, and SORACOM SIM cards

The following is a guest post by Alexis Susset of SORACOM, an IoT communications platform. Today we are setting up resin.io devices with a SORACOM SIM card and our preferred enterprise 3G Dongle, the Huawei MS2131. With this setup complete, we'll be able to ship out devices that work anywhere in the world. Together with this tutorial, we're also publishing base code so that you can leverage…

March 14, 2017 / 3 min

git remote tool from NVBOTS

When you're building software for a production environment there are several other environments the code-base must traverse before being fully released. This "one repository - multiple environments" is a common pattern that resin supports really well. However, things can get complicated when you have several local branches and multiple remotes. It's easy to get tangled and push the wrong code to…

June 09, 2016 / 2 min

Building a Distributed Machine Learning Testbench with resin.io

Revan Sopher is a 2016 graduate of Rutgers University, and an incoming SETI at Google Mountain View. Intro For our senior design project, we decided to build a testbench for developing and iterating distributed machine learning algorithms of the sort that our adviser studies. The general idea is to deliver a complete solution based on a python library which hides away lower-level concepts such as…

June 01, 2016 / 7 min

InfluxDB on resin.io

Kimmo Huoman is an electronic engineering student and employee of Lappeenranta University of Technology. His main interest is home automation and embedded Linux systems in general. What is InfluxDB? image In short, InfluxDB is a time-series database, designed to handle large amounts of numeric data. What makes InfluxDB special when compared to many other time series databases, is that it doesn't…

April 12, 2016 / 8 min

Multi-container with docker-compose on resin.io

Note: Beginning with resinOS v2.12.0, multicontainer applications are supported as a core feature of the platform. If you are currently running a Docker-in-Docker setup, you'll want to rename the docker-compose.yml file to something like dind-compose.yml. Then when you run Docker Compose in your container, you can use the -f flag with the new file name: docker-compose -f dind-compose.yml up…

March 30, 2016 / 7 min

Planning lunch with a Slackbot on resin.io

Thibault Maekelbergh is a student at Devine - Design & Development and a freelance developer residing in Bruges. Currently exploring the latest in web technologies and using the web as his playground. Avid JavaScript fan & die-hard vinyl lover. The story begins… Our group of friends uses Slack as the main communication/collaboration tool for school work and our obligatory random banter. Usually…

March 10, 2016 / 4 min

February 16, 2016 / 4 min

Build a monitoring dashboard with resin.io

Johannes 'fish' Ziemke is Platforms Engineer at Jodel. Jodel is a Berlin startup building a location based social network. Join them if you want to work with a great team on a technically challenging product! Introduction We're running Prometheus for monitoring both OS level metrics like CPU usage as well as application level metrics like error counters or latency of requests to our data stores…

Home automation using Python, Flask & Celery

This is first in a series of community posts where we invite users to share how they are using resin. It could be anything from a useful snippet to a fully fledged product they are building as long as it benefits and inspires the community. Kicking things off we have Dražen Lučanin from CloudFleet, a startup building an open source personal data center for plug-and-play encrypted email. They are…

January 08, 2016 / 4 min