thoughts | Balena.io Blog

30 posts tagged with “thoughts”

Barcelona’s 2nd Mini-Meet: Bridging the gap between balena and the community

The second balena mini-meet recently took center stage in the city of Barcelona. The event served as a platform not only for meeting in person and to work but also for sharing knowledge, trends and brainstorming about the latest developments at balena. Here’s a recap of our recent Barcelona mini-meet and a sneak peek into what comes next. balena mini-meet in the beach of Barcelona The Inspiration…

October 30, 2023 / 3 min

See and hug other humans: Mini meets for remote teams!

Balena is a fully remote company. We’re remote first (since long before the events of 2020), but still acknowledge how important it is to see and hug each other in real life as much as we can. This July, we held our second annual Cornwall (UK) mini-meet (you won’t find a blog post for the first one - let’s call it a pre-experimental, undocumented, proof of concept). Separate from how we usually…

August 25, 2023 / 10 min

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Defense of "Hobbyist Markets"

Jessica Livingston's article on the WSJ yesterday, had a very interesting quote: Successful startups almost always start narrow and deep. Apple started with a computer Steve Wozniak made to impress his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club. There weren’t a lot of them, but they were really interested. Apple started out from within the Homebrew Computer Club, which was spurred by the arrival of the…

June 04, 2014 / 3 min

You Can't Secure What You Cannot Update: Hardware Edition

UPDATE - resin.io is now balena. Read the official announcement here, if you would like to find out more. When people think about connected devices around them (cars, thermostats, fridges, routers) as something that can undergo software updates over the air, they often think of it as a necessary evil, with unsettling security implications. How do I know my fridge won't update to send out more…

April 10, 2014 / 3 min

Two years of Pi: Units sold and Raspberry startups!

The Raspberry Pi is an iconic device, a runaway success made in the UK. It's inadvertently found itself on the zeitgeist of the Internet of Things, so we've been gathering data about its progress. On the occasion of it's second birthday, why not share them with the world? Devices sold The headline number here is "more than 2.5 million". Speaking to people in the space, there was a general…

March 01, 2014 / 2 min

A completely non-technical explanation of Linux Containers

I was speaking to someone without a technical background yesterday, trying to explain where Linux Containers are a better choice than virtual machines, in a way that was faithful to the actual underlying system architecture. While the container metaphor is great, it doesn't really help explain how containers are superior to virtual machines. My sense was that the fundamental pattern behind LXC…

February 25, 2014 / 4 min

Evergreen hardware is inevitable

Four short clippings from the trenches of recent tech developments: I. Toyota today issued a recall of 1.9 million Prius cars to fix a software defect, just like GM did one month ago. One other car company was able to avoid the vast expenditure and brand damage associated with physical recalls: Tesla issued a similar software update over the air, without asking its customers to take their cars…

February 12, 2014 / 3 min

11 Thoughts on Developing for Developers

We’ve recently come to realise that building products for developers isn’t a well-understood category. Enterprise and consumer sales are known quantities, but a precious few 'get' the developer market. It could be seen as a way into enterprise through the back door, but you’re speaking to real people, who are looking to use your product to make their lives more enjoyable or less painful. And in…

December 13, 2013 / 5 min

The chronicle of a Wargame

by Petros Angelatos At my previous startup, Kamibu, we used to play what we called Wargames. The story below was my introduction to programming embedded computers, so I thought it was fitting to write it up for the Resin.io blog. Computer Wargame: Game between hackers with the goal of acquiring control of the opponent's computer Kamibu Version: Make the opponent's computer display a green screen…

December 05, 2013 / 7 min

Happy 18th Birthday JavaScript! A look at an unlikely past and bright future.

It was 18 years ago today that JavaScript was announced in a joint press release by Netscape and Sun. That week, Michael Jackson's "Earth Song" was in the charts, and in 17 days Ruby would launch its first version too. The press release leads with this epic title: NETSCAPE AND SUN ANNOUNCE JAVASCRIPT, THE OPEN, CROSS-PLATFORM OBJECT SCRIPTING LANGUAGE FOR ENTERPRISE NETWORKS AND THE INTERNET The…

November 23, 2013 / 9 min

The Internet of Things will belong to the startups.

We now know the World Wide Web of the early 90's was a land rich in commercial opportunity to say the least. But it did not seem that way to large corporations of the day. Even when it was clear that it was the way of the future, it wasn't clear how to actually realise that potential. Some of that failure to capitalise on the Web could be attributed to confirmation bias. When you're working for…

November 16, 2013 / 3 min

The Internet of Autonomous Things: Strong Devices, Weakly Connected

A look around the Internet of Things space will have you convinced that the future is small, weak devices, sensors and actuators, in constant communication with powerful intelligence in the cloud, which does all the interesting bits of work. You can see this by the fact that most every "Internet of Things Platform" is a data collection and command pushing platform. Each has a twist, some times own…

November 13, 2013 / 3 min

Why port Docker to the Raspberry Pi?

Since our post last night with instructions on how to get Docker on the Pi, several puzzled commenters have been inquiring as to the reasoning behind such a bizarre undertaking. It's a valid question that we really should have dealt with in the original post. Sleep deprivation probably had something to do with missing that. So here's a summary of our reasoning: Dependency redeployment without OS…

November 11, 2013 / 3 min

JavaScript's Final Frontier

Disclaimer: For those that have a burning hatred (or lingering dislike) of JavaScript, this post will likely not be a good use of time. If you take away one thing, let it be this: This post is a retelling of JavaScript's history and a view to its future. There is a community of people out there that are very excited by it, and it's ok if you don't feel that way. There's enough room in the…

November 06, 2013 / 5 min

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