28 posts tagged with “thoughts”

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Why Linux containers matter for the Internet of Things

TL;DR: At resin.io, we believe Linux containers are the first practical virtualization technology for the embedded world, enabling isolated application failures, efficient updates, and a flexible yet familiar workflow. By adding binary deltas, a minimal container engine, support for a wide variety of devices, and resiliency to power and network failures, we've made Docker containers an ideal…

October 16, 2017 / 7 min

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Our first experiments with multi-container apps

...and our plans for the near future Resin.io provides an ultra-easy way to deploy a Docker container to remote devices, empowering the next generation of IoT devices. We are aware that one of our most important features to add is smooth support for applications that need more than one container, and this is a key piece of our roadmap. While looking into what would be the best way to implement…

December 08, 2016 / 3 min

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We Are Back From Summit 2016

The resin.io team has just returned from Summit 2016, our annual gathering held in Athens. Running a remote team has lots of benefits, but in our experience, getting to know people face-to-face accelerates remote collaboration. This is why we gather for a week of talks, discussions, hacks, and activities. Talks As our team gets larger, it becomes harder to keep track of what's going on across…

November 07, 2016 / 4 min

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The Perils of Writing Disk Images on Windows

This is a story about how we had to go into the guts of Windows to figure out how to write to a USB drive with JavaScript without getting a permission error. But let's take it from the top. Etcher is an Electron app, based on a from-scratch implementation of a node.js engine to write to SD cards and USB flash drives, which is designed to work on all platforms. In case that was too easy, we set out…

September 28, 2016 / 6 min

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Resin.io Hack Friday

Every Friday at resin.io we are working on projects that are our own interests - as long as it somehow connected to resin.io in some way. These Hack Fridays brought us a lot of insights, not just by dogfooding our platform, but by helping to find interesting tools, enhancing our work environment (such as this resinified office lock did), and letting us quickly tests out ideas that were bugging us…

September 22, 2016 / 1 min

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How We Fixed the Raspberry Pi GPU for Containers

Raspberry Pi graphics testing The Problem Not so long ago a number of our customers ran into a peculiar problem - applications which used the GPU on Raspberry Pi devices were not working. This included both 2D and 3D acceleration, so not only was 3D rendering affected, but also video playback and even accelerated window managers as well. The symptoms presented themselves rather strangely - the…

June 30, 2016 / 10 min

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Device Bandwidth/Data usage

How low can we go? At resin.io, connectivity plays an important role. In order to provide our users with a clear view of their devices, the resin device Agent constantly keeps our API informed about the devices' conditions and applies any changes, like downloading new application updates or environment variable changes by negotiating with our API. While a quick reflection of actions is great…

March 23, 2016 / 4 min

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Will resin.io ever support Android?

We some times get the question of whether resin.io will ever support Android devices. There's a lot to unpack with a question like that, and we've recently been doing some research to be able to give an informed answer. This post is intended to act as a thought experiment, independent of what's currently on our roadmap or planning. Along the way, we'll share some of the insights we had while deep…

February 23, 2016 / 5 min

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How we run a remote team at resin.io

on a boat We're on a BOAT! Greece, resin.io summit '15 If you've looked at our team page, you may have noticed we have people in 10 different countries, with clusters in Seattle, Athens, and London. While we started down this path by necessity, we jumped in with both feet early on and we now consider it one of our core strengths. We're often asked about this and how we manage a team so distributed…

January 28, 2016 / 6 min

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HummingBoard overview: SolidRun's upgradeable SBC

Τhe world of mini PCs and single board computers has become pretty fascinating nowadays: from Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone to Intel NUC mini PC and so many other boards, the maker community and the commercial world have a wide range of choices to jumpstart their projects. However, that hasn't deterred companies like Solidrun, which released last year the HummingBoard as a more powerful alternative to…

November 18, 2015 / 4 min

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Hands on the future: Many autonomous devices, one brain

resin.io Eighty-nine years ago, in 1926, the physicist, inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla predicted in an interview: “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain.” A look at what has become known as the internet of things, or IoT, shows we are definitely heading this way. Tesla Motors, a company named after the Serbian American inventor, has…

October 29, 2015 / 6 min

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Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC): The PC re-defined

intel_nuc_resin.io The Intel NUC falls on the intersection between commercial connected devices and consumers personal computer prompting the question what truly distinguishes the two. Efficiency, size, price or a specific marketing approach? The NUC is balancing act of all of these factors, affording it the title of a mini PC. We’ve explored how the mini PC has fared in limbo between these two…

July 01, 2015 / 3 min

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Let’s Beagle! A dive into the world of BeagleBone

Do you remember our little report for the Raspberry Pi? As big fans of the open source community we decided to dig up some interesting information about another Single-Board Computer (SBC), the famous BeagleBone. To begin with, the Beagle family of computer products include BeagleBoard, BeagleBoard xM, the original BeagleBone and the BeagleBone Black. Here’s an overview of the different release…

June 18, 2015 / 3 min

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Reinterpreting 12 Factor Apps for the Internet of Things

The Twelve Factor App (henceforth 12fa) pattern, described and advocated by Adam Wiggins, Founding CTO of Heroku, has been hugely influential in providing a philosophical underpinning for the "git push", Platform-as-a-Service deployment pattern that Heroku spearheaded. Resin.io applies the "git push" pattern to embedded Linux devices like the BeagleBone and the Raspberry Pi. Over the last 9 months…

January 11, 2015 / 9 min

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Let's make the Internet of Things as boring as possible

The Internet of Things today is a labyrinth of complex decisions with unclear tradeoffs. Everywhere a developer looks, there are new technologies to learn, many times without an obvious advantage over more pedestrian technologies as used on the interent at large. So how's this for a mission statement: Let's make it boring. Predictable, familiar, intuitive, transparent. Only when the basic building…

November 17, 2014 / 1 min

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Programming like an investor

by Alexandros Marinos I've run a development team for the last three years, and I've recently gotten a sense that while I have a fairly crystalised notion of what I like and don't like in a developer's approach to programming, I haven't put it down in words. This is my attempt at doing that, and I feel the picture it paints is different enough from most material I read that it's worth publishing…

August 01, 2014 / 10 min