27 posts tagged with “hardware”

article

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 16, 2020 / 6 min

tutorial

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…

November 26, 2019 / 9 min

tutorial

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

tutorial

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

tutorial

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

tutorial

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

article

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…

February 11, 2019 / 6 min

tutorial

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

tutorial

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 20, 2018 / 26 min

article

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…

December 13, 2018 / 7 min

tutorial

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 29, 2018 / 3 min

tutorial

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 22, 2018 / 12 min

tutorial

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…

November 13, 2018 / 11 min

post

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

article

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

post

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