Balena.io Blog

November 16, 2020 / 6 min

Why is the balenaFin right for fleet owners? Part 3: Networking

This is the third in a series of posts about the key features that make the balenaFin the right choice for IoT fleet owners. For those who aren’t familiar with the balenaFin, you can take a look at this introductory post. We’ve divided the series into three posts that cover the main categories: storage, power and networking. When it comes time to choose an IoT device for professional workloads…

November 26, 2019 / 9 min

Add new functionality to affordable CNC machines using CNC.js and balena

Here’s a simple way to add premium CNC machine features to low-cost options using CNC.js and balenaOS. Now you can outfit your shop with incredible maker tools without breaking the bank. Here's a balena logo scribed by one of my shop machines Fundamentally, I’m a maker at heart. I’ve been making things for years, but it’s only recently that I have had the time, space (and, yes, cashflow) to start…

Install a balenaFin outdoors, for use as a LoRa gateway, flight tracker, weather station and more!

Back in May we looked at deploying the software to run a balenaFin as a TTN LoRa Gateway, today we’re working on the natural progression from this; mounting the hardware up a mast and making the installation more permanent. The techniques we look at here will allow us to install hardware in a weatherproof enclosure outdoors which can then be used for a variety of applications such as the planned…

August 26, 2019 / 12 min

Taming the 'hard' in hardware in 8 steps - a product development journey

In 2017, we (balena) embarked on a mission to build the ultimate flashing media. As a software company, we didn't realize the hornet's nest that we had stepped into. Little did we anticipate that in the process, we would end up re-examining the wheel at every step, going through eight design iterations and creating our own board from scratch. Nor did we expect it to take a full two years -- four…

July 02, 2019 / 20 min

Build an air quality monitor with InfluxDB, Grafana, and Docker on a Raspberry Pi

UPDATE on 7 July 2021: Note that this guide is for the legacy balenaSense v1. See our updated tutorial for the current version of balenaSense (v2). _Last updated: 07 July 2021 Have you ever been interested in monitoring the air quality in your home or outside where you live and work? This project, which we’ve dubbed balenaSense, will get you up and running with a setup to take readings of…

March 19, 2019 / 17 min

Add a display to your Pi-hole for monitoring and stats

Recently, we posted a full tutorial telling you how to set up Pi-hole for network-wide ad-blocking on your entire network. Today we’re going to expand on that a little by showing you how to add a display to your setup for monitoring and statistics using PADD. What you'll need For this guide you'll need to be running the the Pi-hole on balenaCloud project by @klutchell that we used in our original…

March 06, 2019 / 6 min

February 11, 2019 / 6 min

The balenaFin v1.1 available to order, featuring dual camera support, PoE, and more!

Today is an exciting day for the balena team as we officially release the balenaFin, our carrier board designed for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 & 3+! The announcement coincides with the launch of the v1.1 revision, featuring many improvements to the original v1.0 board we and our customers have been working with for the past 9 months. To top it off, we're making the first 100 v1.1 developer…

Automate the backlight timer on your balenaDash display

We've just updated balenaDash with functionality to enable you to automatically turn the backlight on and off using cron scheduling. Here's how to use it. A lot of you have been building balenaDash displays since we posted our tutorial a few months ago, and one of the most requested features is to be able to automatically turn the backlight of the display on and off. Today we've pushed an update…

January 17, 2019 / 2 min

December 20, 2018 / 26 min

Build festive lighting for the holidays with balena

This post has been updated: We published a revised and simplified version of this guide (with extra features!) for December 2019 here. Interested in building an LED lighting project with Raspberry Pi? We’ve got you covered! In this post we’re going to take a look at setting up a custom RGB LED matrix and driving it with a Raspberry Pi, Fadecandy board and Glediator software. For the longest…

December 13, 2018 / 7 min

State of the EtcherPro

Earlier in 2018 we first described our plans for a professional SD duplicator and flashing device named EtcherPro. We’ve made a lot more progress since then, but we’ve also taken a lot more time than we first thought, so here’s what we’ve been up to. EtcherPro was largely born of our customers’ (and our own) need to flash multiple balenaOS images when adding devices to applications on balenaCloud…

November 29, 2018 / 3 min

Assembling the official Raspberry Pi touchscreen

This is a guide to cover connecting and configuring the official Raspberry Pi 7" touchscreen, along with rotating the LCD output in balenaCloud There are a few connections to make from the display controller board to the Raspberry Pi. This includes the flat/ribbon cable for the video signal, and additional connections to the GPIO header port for power and communication for the touchscreen. First…

November 22, 2018 / 12 min

Make a web frame with Raspberry Pi in 30 minutes

Last updated: 26th October, 2020 Try balenaDash, a simple project to quickly get you up and running with a web frame to display family photos, dashboards, videos, and more. Introduction balenaDash is a Raspberry Pi powered digital photo/web frame with a difference! It can display a fully GPU accelerated web page or app of your choosing and allow you to update that content from anywhere. Here're…

November 13, 2018 / 11 min

Create a GPS tracking system with cell connectivity and minimal bandwidth

In this tutorial, we're going to build a GPS tracking system using a balenaFin board, balenaCloud and a Hologram SIM card. This post outlines the steps to create a GPS tracking system, a useful project in its own right, but also a great way to experience a few features rolling out soon in the balena ecosystem. Follow along as we go step-by-step through the entire process of setting everything up…

How to keep your device up and running during power outages

Deploying an Internet-of-Things (IoT) project to production can involve various complex and unexpected problems, such as firmware updates, system reliability and many more. By using balenaCloud to deploy and manage your fleet, most of these headaches can be avoided. However, if your device loses power, there is very little we can do to ensure the device remains operating and online. With that in…

October 24, 2018 / 6 min

Introducing Project Fin: a board for fleet owners

Update February 2023: On February 1st 2023 we made the decision to cease manufacturing the balenaFin due to production and supply chain challenges, the balenaFin design files have been released to the public and will be available indefinitely. You can find the source files here. Update February 2019: we have now officially launched the balenaFin v1.1 - read the announcement here or buy now Today…

March 19, 2018 / 6 min

The Evolution of the Beast Continues

TLDR: the Beast is a single board computer cluster designed as a testing and demo rig for resin.io. We built Beast v1, with 120 Raspberry Pis, back in 2014 and started working on the next iteration, Beast v2, with 144 Raspberry Pis, about a year later. Now we're designing Beast v3 and sharing progress on Gitter! Beast v2 in the wild Weighing in at nearly 150 kg and measuring nearly 2m tall, Beast…

January 06, 2017 / 2 min

The making of Boombeastic: a Raspberry Pi-based connected speaker

A high-quality, stand-alone, fast-prototyped, connected speaker Preface On a June hack Friday I decided to prototype a Raspberry Pi based speaker that could become a hack-friendly platform for the community. I was also interested in experimenting with a fast-prototyping approach involving resin.io. My goals for the project were to: Achieve good sound quality, something that an audiophile could at…

October 13, 2016 / 9 min

Good, Better, Beast! #9

For all of you out there, following the development of Beast 2.0, I'd like to apologize for not having updates for a loooooong time (check out the last one) . It's not that there's nothing to say, rather the opposite, there's too much going on, and getting ahead with the Beast 2.0 was prioritized above talking about it. So here's an update with a bunch of new bits and pieces! The Beast 2.0 Tile We…

August 05, 2016 / 3 min

Good, Better, Beast - #8

Sharing is Caring After quite a long development process, the design of the Beast 2.0 system is finally worthy of a release. We’re looking to manufacture upwards of 100 units. At the same time, we are reflecting on the nature of truly open-source hardware (OSHW) design and looking for the best possible way to share the mechanical design of the Beast with the wider community in a way that is open…

March 18, 2016 / 3 min

February 25, 2016 / 3 min

Good, Better, Beast - #7

Spit and Polish Hello again. This time round we’ll be sharing a couple of the final touches to the Beast design process. A look at the refined design of the BeastTile front panel - the primary point of customisation for the system. Strength testing of the chassis to determine how high we can stack. A quick look at a refined design of the power hub. Faceplate By design, the front panel, or…

February 10, 2016 / 1 min

Good, Better, Beast - #6

A quick update OctoTower Since the last entry, we’ve been engrossed in the fine details of the BeastTile design. Mostly questions of usability. We've also been talking to a customer who’s keen to use the BeastTile as a demonstration platform for their IoT product suite. Introducing the OctoTower, an 8-sided column constructed with BeastTiles and a few custom-designed structural and cosmetic…

Good, Better, Beast - Week 5

It’s Aliiiiiive! CU logo The little monster breathed it’s first this week when we assembled the first 6 units of the BeastTile. As can be expected with any first-born, we had a few teething issues, but all-in-all the build went smoooooth. Like a baby’s bottom. The first chunk of this post is technical mechanical engineer grease-monkey stuff. Scroll on past if you’re here for the pictures. Chassis…

January 22, 2016 / 4 min

Good, Better, Beast - Week 4

Let’s Get Physical… logo-chest Ahoy. We promised to venture beyond the comforts of CAD this week and commit to something real. Well, our word is our bond… We went through two rounds of prototyping, where we improved the structural strength of the tile, fine-tuned the fits of interlocking components, and generally honed the details. Prototype #1 proto-type 1 This guy demonstrated nice ease-of…

January 15, 2016 / 3 min

Good, Better, Beast - Week 3

This is a quick welcome back. It’s been quiet in here due to the post x-mas food coma, but looking forward to the next steps. Last time we described the design of our BeastTile, and how they interconnect, both mechanically and electrically. We also gave some examples of what you could build. This week we’re gonna build a few tiles and hope they’ll fit together. There have been a couple of minor…

January 07, 2016 / 3 min

December 16, 2015 / 5 min

Good, Better, Beast - Week 2

For those who have just tuned in, we’re working on a new improved version of what we call the Beast. In our last post, we shared our goals for the Beast as a demonstration platform for resin.io, but also mentioned that we’d like to open the design up for use by any- and everyone to hack. You can join in our discussions in the chat room. We want to see the Beast used in ways that we couldn’t…

December 09, 2015 / 3 min

Good, Better, Beast!

Beast 2.0 -- Taking Single Board Computer clusters to the next level About a year ago, we wrote about the Beast, our 120 Raspberry Pi cluster. Since then, we’ve had a lot of experience with it. First surprise was that the Beast never spent too long in one place. It was never meant to leave London, but a quick search of Twitter shows photos of it at various events, and that’s just some of what the…