109 posts tagged with “tutorial”

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What's New in Version 13 of Balena Python SDK

In this blog post, we will provide you with a concise overview of the new features and breaking changes introduced in Version 13 of the balena Python SDK. We have focused on enhancing the balena Python SDK to further streamline your IoT development workflow. This release brings a wide range of new features designed to enhance your experience with the SDK, as well as some breaking changes that may…

June 28, 2023 / 12 min

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Enabling deep sleep for your Raspberry Pi project

Single board computers (SBCs) are awesome, small, low-power devices, often with wireless connectivity, which makes them ideal for simple battery operated projects. However, when calculating your energy budget, you often come to realize they are not quite low power enough to accommodate small batteries running over a long time (multiple days/months). We often don't need full-time availability, so…

September 20, 2022 / 12 min

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Mastodon on balena

What Mastodon is a popular open-source microblogging platform. It uses the Activity Pub specification to implement the federation. In practice, it means that one can subscribe and interact with users from external servers and see activity across the network. Why Setting up your own Mastodon server from scratch requires some effort. At a minimum, you'll need your own domain, mail service account…

September 20, 2022 / 7 min

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Help your dog (or cat!) communicate with buttons using balena

My work from home co-pilot is an adorable Corgi mix named Brigitte. She is great for reducing stress and generally improving quality of life while working, but she has her own needs too. And when I’m absorbed with a task, it can be easy to forget that. But to my defense, she isn’t the best communicator. Brigitte is a quiet dog, which means when she needs to go outside to relieve herself, she often…

September 12, 2022 / 10 min

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Build You Own Voice Assistant – A balenaLabs Residency project

Voice Assistants represent an entirely different way of how we can interact with machines. In the past few years, Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa have revolutionized the entire field, however, all these devices work "online" meaning that they send your voice commands to a server in the cloud, where this data is stored for further improvements on their voice recognition models. If you, like many…

August 29, 2022 / 8 min

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Visualize and analyze radio waves with RTL Power – A balenaLabs Residency project

This project, as part of my balenaLabs residency, combines RTL Power, a project to visualize and analyze signal frequency bands in a simpler and general way. This uses a Software Defined Radio (SDR), rtl_power and balena! actual-dashboard-full-2 actual-heatmap1-full Why did I create this project? Common wireless systems rely on some form of radio waves. These waves are differentiated by frequency…

July 19, 2022 / 8 min

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Prototype, deploy, and scale robotics solutions with balena

In my last post, I walked through a high-level look at how one could use balena and ROS a platform to create one or many edge device robots. Since then, I’ve published several balena Blocks that help bring this vision to life, and in this post, I’d like to walk through how anyone can use these blocks to prototype, deploy, and scale an IoT robot fleet. Create a robotics project using balena Blocks…

June 24, 2022 / 17 min

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Introducing the Cloud Relay Block: send data to your favorite cloud provider

Often customers want to send data from their balena device to a cloud IoT provider like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. These providers allow you to register your device to their IoT service and provide public key credentials so you can send the data securely. Introducing the Cloud Relay balena Block Our balenaCloud service already provides backend management for the device, so we created some tools…

June 22, 2022 / 6 min

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How to set up Blues Wireless to backup sensor data on Raspberry Pi using balena

In this post, I’ll introduce Blues Wireless, and how to use it as a backup method of connectivity with embedded devices, like Raspberry Pis. We’ve packed the power of Blues Wireless into a balena Block so that any edge developer can add it to a fleet and provide extra connection redundancy to your devices. Set up Blues Wireless as a backup connectivity method for your balena fleet We’re all used…

June 15, 2022 / 7 min

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Bring your model railroad to life with LED, movement, and sound automation using balena

Many model railroad enthusiasts have basements filled with photo-realistic layouts or join clubs with amazing cities and yards. I’m not an enthusiast, but a few years ago I pulled out an old Lionel set I had as a kid and thought a new paint job could make it look less plasticy. I’ve never built a layout (nor would I have room for a large one) but occasionally I’d send a train around a loop or…

June 07, 2022 / 13 min

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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

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Connect a Seeed Soil and Temperature sensor with your balena Helium Data-Only Hotspot on Datacake

In another blog post, we showed you how to build a Helium Data-only hotspot using balenaCloud. Here’s a way to add a practical gardening use case to the hotspot: monitoring the temperature and moisture level of plants outside (while mining a small amount of $HNT depending on the type of equipment you use!). Adding the sensors to monitor the garden One of the main problems in my garden is that the…

May 26, 2022 / 8 min

tutorial

Join the largest network of open-source, low-cost, greenhouse gas detection sensors

Editor's Note: The Ribbit Network project is a balenaHub Challenge winner. This guide is contributed by the project creator, Keenan Johnson. Try it out and join this amazing citizen science effort. Congratulations, Keenan! The Ribbit Network is a large network of open-source, low-cost, Greenhouse Gas Detection Sensors. This citizen science project aims to create the world's largest Greenhouse Gas…

April 29, 2022 / 10 min

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Build your Helium Data-Only Hotspot with balena

In previous posts, we covered different ways to build a LoRaWAN gateway connected to The Things Stack (the former The Things Network (TTN)). In this post, we’ll show you how to deploy a fleet of Helium data-only hotspots on Raspberry Pi and Seeed WM1302 LoRa concentrators (SX1302). Learn how to build a Helium hotspot with balena and Seeed Helium is a crowdsourced LoRaWAN network running on…

April 22, 2022 / 9 min

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Meet Sunlamp, an elegant LED automation solution using balena

There are plenty of automated LED projects on the internet, but this one is special to me as I designed and built it as part of my Labs Residency Program. I wanted it to be elegant and accessible for any maker out there. I'm excited to introduce you all to Sunlamp. Introducing Sunlamp on balena I'll talk through why I designed the Sunlamp in more details. You can also skip ahead to the tutorial…

March 24, 2022 / 10 min

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How to log sensor values to Notion using balena - a basic habit and environment tracking app

We're well into 2022, and I hope you all are on track toward hitting your ambitious goals out there. I know I am. I'm keeping my momentum going by showing you all how to use the Notion API to log weather and sensor data coming in from one of my balena devices. Notion Meets Physical Computing I'll walk through a bit of why I decided to build this. If you're here for the build steps, go ahead and…

February 24, 2022 / 10 min

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Create a fleet of centrally-managed Bluetooth low-energy(ble) beacons with ble-lighthouse and balena

Low-energy Bluetooth beacons bridge the physical and the digital world. Whether it’s navigating indoor devices or broadcasting sensor information in a connectionless state, beacons have efficiently enabled the Internet of Things(IoT) to be part of many use cases. Introducing ble-lighthouse, the best way to build fleets of Bluetooth low-energy beacons As a part of my balenaLabs Residency, I decided…

January 26, 2022 / 8 min

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Build a heartrate monitor using an e-ink reader, a Raspberry Pi, and balena

Are you looking to decrease your stress and improve your mental well-being? Follow along with my DIY guide for monitoring your heart rate during the work day! Introducing balenaHealth, a heart rate monitor based on balena and a Raspberry Pi I built a heart rate monitoring system for my home office using balena technology as part of my balenaLabs Residence. Use the steps from this guide to follow…

January 12, 2022 / 15 min

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Interfacing balena edge devices with AdafruitIO

If you’re someone like me who can solder wires together, and knows how to program a single board computer to blink addressable LEDs, but always struggles when it comes to creating a beautiful front-end user interface to control them over the web, this blog post is for you. Learn how to use AdafruitIO to interface with balena devices Let’s explore how to interface edge devices on balena using…

January 06, 2022 / 7 min

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Build a self-hosted, voice-controlled mood tracker using Rhasspy and balena

Mood trackers keep a record of a person's mood at regular intervals. Their purpose is to help look for patterns in mood variations over time caused by different situations and circumstances. However, manually feeding data into a mood tracker can be a cumbersome task, and some people may have privacy concerns about using third-party mood tracking services. In this blog post, I’ll show how I…

November 24, 2021 / 17 min

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Improve your sleep (or other parts of your life) with automated curtains at home

While there are plenty of home automation lighting projects out there to help you automate and control LEDs, I wanted to control something physical within the home - curtains or blinds. Check out my balenaLabs residency project where I prototype a way to automate curtain or blind movement to adjust the heat and light that enters my home. Why is this important? Circadian rhythm is an important…

October 28, 2021 / 15 min

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How to use BLE to communicate between an Arduino running Edge Impulse and a Pi running balenaOS

In this post, we’ll look at how Edge Impulse and balena work together and what led me down the path to improvise a solution using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) so the two could communicate with each other. Illustration of Edge Impulse and balena project I’ve been fascinated by the work of Edge Impulse, which is a platform that allows devices such as microcontrollers and single board computers to…

September 30, 2021 / 7 min

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How I built a video game prototype with custom hardware and balena

I’ve been wanting to make this alternative controller game for a while and found the perfect opportunity to do so at balena. Read on to learn about my idea, how I used balena to prototype my project, and what next steps I’ll take to bring this edge project to life. Animated GIF of project My game is about an ancient spirit trapped inside of an ornate brick. The picture below shows some concept art…

September 27, 2021 / 11 min

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Run your private The Things Stack network server on a Raspberry Pi with balena

Use this guide to learn how to build a standalone LoRaWAN server solution that runs on a Raspberry Pi and balena. This solution uses The Things Stack LoRaWAN Network Server Open Source Edition and you can run it with one click. Running it using containers on balena means that it can run alongside with other services such as the balena LoRaWAN BasicsTM Station gateway. As a result, you can have…

August 13, 2021 / 11 min

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How to run edge AI with OpenVINO on balenaCloud

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process from start to finish and show you how to deploy an AI application using an Intel NUC and the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO Toolkit, fully containerized and ready to scale to any number of devices with balenaCloud. Developers getting ready to begin AI projects have no shortage of options when it comes to platforms, frameworks, models, and sample…

July 27, 2021 / 18 min

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Running OpenWebRX on balena to remotely monitor local radio spectrum

Combine a Raspberry Pi and an inexpensive SDR (Software-Defined Radio) dongle to create a remote monitoring device that you can place anywhere in the world (with internet access) to view the surrounding radio spectrum and stream audio from some of the detected signals. Combine balena and OpenWebRX to create a remote radio monitoring, visualization, and listening device It hosts a small web server…

January 15, 2020 / 9 min

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Two projects, one device: turn your Raspberry Pi into a multitool!

Built one of our projects, and want to expand upon it? Perhaps you want to build a second one, but lack the hardware? Fear not! One of the great benefits of balenaCloud is that you can combine different projects and run everything on one device. In this short guide, we’re going to take a look at how to run multiple projects on a single device, allowing you to do more with the hardware you already…

January 07, 2020 / 10 min

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Run a mixed-architecture app using 64-bit balenaOS on the Raspberry Pi 4

Ever wished it was possible to run both 32-bit and 64-bit containers on your Raspberry Pi 4 simultaneously? Well thanks to the 64-bit version of balenaOS, it is! This tutorial will show you how to build a basic weather chart, displaying the current temperature and humidity of your chosen city, whilst logging the data in a MongoDB database. This project has been put together to demonstrate the…

September 13, 2019 / 5 min

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Build a Raspberry Pi powered live train station sign for your desk

Last updated: 10th December 2021 Build your own UK train station platform departure display (next train indicator) with live data using a Raspberry Pi Zero/Zero 2, OLED display and 3D printed case - a cool (and practical!) desktop gadget. It involves a bit of software, a bit of soldering, and some 3D printing too. Introduction A while back I came across this tweet by Chris Hutchinson, he’d…

July 30, 2019 / 8 min

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Turn your old speakers or Hi-Fi into Bluetooth, Airplay and Spotify receivers with a Raspberry Pi and this step-by-step guide

Last updated: 16th March 2021 If you’ve got an old Hi-Fi or sound system with an AUX input, this project is for you. Try balenaSound, a starter project to quickly and easily add Bluetooth, Airplay and Spotify Connect and multi-room capability to an old Hi-Fi, speakers, or any other audio device using only a Raspberry Pi! Before you start Updates We’re continually updating this post along with the…

July 08, 2019 / 12 min

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Aggregate data from a fleet of sensors with balenaSense and InfluxDB

UPDATE on 07 July 2021: Note that the latest version of balenaSense (v2) does not allow data from multiple sensors to be aggregated using the steps outlined in this post. To aggregate data in v2, see our updated guide. Back in March we wrote about balenaSense, our project to monitor air quality with a Raspberry Pi, Grafana and InfluxDB. Lots of you have been using this project and giving great…

June 27, 2019 / 10 min

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Bring a dummy security camera to life, using a Raspberry Pi and WebRTC

A few weeks ago we released a project called balenaCam where @mbalamat developed an application running on balenaOS that initiates a WebRTC video streaming connection between the server (a Raspberry Pi, for example) and the client. You can check the full blog post here. Once the main core of the application was stable, we decided to challenge ourselves and take the project down a slightly…

June 07, 2019 / 10 min

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It's a sign: build a remote controlled digital display with Screenly OSE and Raspberry Pi

Try this project to get up and running with a display you can control remotely to display photos, videos, dashboards, web pages, and digital signage. This tutorial was put together by the friendly folks at Screenly. They've recently updated their open-source digital signage software project to work seamlessly with the balenaCloud platform, enabling you to very quickly deploy and easily manage…

June 05, 2019 / 13 min

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Build a smart photo slideshow with balenaCloud

Last updated: 26th October, 2020 When we started the balenaDash project, the main goal was to make it easy and straightforward to deploy IoT devices that display information on a screen. We've updated the photo component into its own standalone project. Build this project to create a photo slideshow hosted on Google Photo Albums, Dropbox Photo Album, or Apple Photos. Photo Gallery is a physical…

May 15, 2019 / 5 min

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Build a TTN LoRa Gateway with balenaFin and balenaCloud

Depecration notice During 2021 The Things Network is moving to The Things Stack (V3). If you plan to deploy a LoRaWAN gateway with The Things Network and balena, you should consider to deploy the Basics Station LoRaWAN gateway running with The Things Stack. If your LoRa concentrator is USB-based and you would like to run it with balenaFin, contact us. We’ve taken a look at deploying a gateway for…

May 13, 2019 / 9 min

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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

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Monitoring the edge with Prometheus pt. 1

A method of self-similar monitoring for the edge. Properly monitoring a fleet of devices is an evolving art. One of the current leaders in the server world for application and hardware monitoring is Prometheus, both for bare metal and as a first-class citizen in the Kubernetes world. In order to reduce the friction between the edge and the cloud, this project will deploy a Prometheus stack to…

May 06, 2019 / 8 min

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How to protect your device with PiJuice and balenaCloud

Last week we published a blog post reviewing some UPS (uninterruptible power supply) HATS for the balenaFin and Raspberry Pi to keep your device up and running during power outages. In this post, we will show you how you can easily add the PiJuice to your current project with the magic of multi-containers so that you can keep tabs on the power status of your devices. PiJuice Board As mentioned…

April 16, 2019 / 4 min

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Control your balenaDash display with a web browser & HTTP API

We’re keeping things moving on the balenaDash project and have just added some additional features to the project. Now you can control the display with a web interface and API, and easily connect to new WiFi networks! Now that the balenaDash project has been out in the wild for a while, we’re getting some great constructive feedback and contributions from everyone who’s built the project and used…

April 15, 2019 / 6 min

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Build a Raspberry Pi-based network camera using WebRTC

Do you want to be able to monitor your house, workplace, husband, wife, kids, pets, etc. when you are not there? Do you have a Raspberry Pi and a camera laying around? If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, keep reading!</span< Updated 9th January 2020 - You can now add multiple projects to the same device. Try combining balenaCam with another project -- oh the possibilities! In…

April 08, 2019 / 9 min

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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

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Sensors and Data Logging with Embedded Linux - The Ultimate Guide Part 3: Multi-Device Sensor Dashboard

This is the third and final part in a series that dives into logging sensor data with embedded Linux, containers, and Balena's platform. The first part was a deep dive into how sensors can be read by embedded Linux, and the second part explored how to collect and graph sensor data with a TIG stack of services. This third part builds on the first and second parts to explore building a multi-device…

March 15, 2019 / 9 min

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Sensors and Data Logging with Embedded Linux - The Ultimate Guide Part 2: Build A Sensor Dashboard

This is the second in a three-part series that dives into logging sensor data with embedded Linux, containers, and Balena's platform. The first part was a deep dive into how sensors can be read by embedded Linux. This second part builds on the first part to add a database and web dashboard for viewing sensor data. You'll learn about multi-container applications in Balena and how to use services…

March 15, 2019 / 17 min

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Sensors and Data Logging with Embedded Linux - The Ultimate Guide Part 1

This project is the first in a three-part series that explores in depth how to log data from sensors with embedded Linux and a container-based architecture. You'll learn how to connect a sensor to a Linux board and read data from it, how to store and graph sensor data with modern service tools like InfluxDB and Grafana, and how to scale the application up to many devices and sensors. This first…

March 15, 2019 / 42 min

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Running a full desktop in a container

While building your next Internet-of-things (IoT) project, sometimes you get to a point where you need to run applications that are made to run on a screen, we call them graphical user interface (GUI) applications. After multiple requests from our users, we decided to write a short tutorial explaining how you can run a desktop manager or a GUI application with balenaCloud or openBalena on any kind…

March 12, 2019 / 7 min

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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

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Running a GUI application with balenaCloud

Have you ever got to a point while working on a project where you absolutely had to run a graphical user interface (GUI) application when you only have access to a headless device? This is an issue that one of our engineers Chris faced a while back while working on the Festive Lighting project, where the software to control the lights only had a GUI version. One solution to this problem lies in…

February 18, 2019 / 5 min

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Deploy network-wide ad-blocking with Pi-hole and a Raspberry Pi

If you’ve ever been frustrated with intrusive and distracting internet advertising, malware and other malicious spyware and tracking software online, and wondered if there was a solution to stop it, this is the project for you. We’re going to set up a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole to block unwanted content network-wide in about 15 minutes! Before you start Introduction For all you adblock/ublock…

January 28, 2019 / 19 min

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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

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Monitoring your balena devices with Datadog

Updated 28 July 2020: Double-checked that we're using the latest Datadog build steps. Here at balena, we have developed a complete set of tools to deploy and manage your fleet of IoT devices, but what if you also want a monitor detailed metrics of a single device or of your entire fleet? That’s when Datadog comes into play as a great complement to your balenaCloud setup. Datadog is software as a…

January 10, 2019 / 6 min

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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

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Using Google Slides with balenaDash

Set up your balenaDash display with a slideshow using Google Slides A fun thing you can do with your display is to have a slideshow of photos, from your last trip to Europe, Thanksgiving with the family or simply some inspirational pictures. For this, you can use Google Slides, so go ahead and create a new slide project, adding one picture per slide. For this example, there are some trekking…

December 04, 2018 / 1 min

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Setting up a dashboard with balenaDash

Updated 9th January 2020 - You can now add multiple projects to the same device. Try combining balenaDash with another project -- oh the possibilities! This is a short guide on how to set up a dashboard to use with our balenaDash project. If you've not yet built one, check out the guide too! About Freeboard Freeboard is a great way to get started with a dashboard quickly; they give you a 30 day…

December 03, 2018 / 2 min

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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

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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

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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

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Build a Bitcoin traffic light with balenaCloud

Follow along and build your own as we hack a traffic light to make a cool Bitcoin value indicator for your desk or office using a Raspberry Pi and balenaCloud. Bitcoin (₿) was initially released at the beginning of January 2009 by an unknown person/group with the codename of "Satoshi Nakamoto", and since the beginning of its existence, the price has been extremely volatile, going from just a few…

October 31, 2018 / 5 min

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Add a cheap ILI9341 LCD to your balena Raspberry Pi project

Whilst looking for easy ways to provide live data output from my project, we discovered that a family of small and inexpensive LCDs are available from all the usual online suppliers. The displays come in a few variations ranging from 2.4” to 2.8”, with and without a touchscreen, and have a resolution of 320x240. They have a serial peripheral interface (SPI) which connects with (one of) the SPI…

September 26, 2018 / 10 min

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Google Cloud IoT and balena.io

This post was written in partnership with our friends at Google IoT Overview In this tutorial, we'll show you how to integrate Google Cloud IoT Core with balena. This will enable you to gather and analyze device telemetry data in the Google Cloud Platform, while remotely managing and updating your devices with balena. To get started, you'll first need to signup for a balena account, if you don't…

September 05, 2018 / 5 min

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Deploying IoT C/C++ projects with Conan and resin.io

This is a guest post written by Luis Martínez de Bartolomé, Senior Software Engineer at Jfrog Creating C/C++ applications for IoT devices can be a challenge. It requires setting up the compiler and toolchain to cross-build for the embedded architecture, managing the application's dependencies, and finding a simple and smart way to deploy the application. In this blog post, we will demonstrate an…

August 13, 2018 / 10 min

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Go flows with Flogo, a framework for ultralight edge microservices

This post was written by Eric Carlier of TIBCO Software. What is Project Flogo? Project Flogo is an application integration framework, written in Go and designed for deploying ultra-lightweight microservices to the edge. Flogo provides a web UI to help you graphically design and debug your application logic, which is compiled into a single binary for use on your IoT devices. Flogo was initially…

June 08, 2018 / 5 min

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Constructing calls to the balena API

At the heart of the balena platform sits the API. Not only does the API facilitate communication between our backend services, it also serves as the primary interface for external applications. The API acts as a source of truth across services, devices, and fleets, and it powers our UI, CLI, and SDKs. We recently updated our API documentation, giving you a better look at the information that is…

June 01, 2018 / 4 min

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Deploying edge workflows with Losant Edge Compute and resin.io

This post was written by Brandon Cannaday of Losant, an easy-to-use and powerful Enterprise IoT Platform designed to help teams quickly and securely build complex real-time connected solutions. Losant Edge Compute offers developers a visual, drag-and-drop editor for building logic workflows, which can be remotely deployed to any number of edge devices: To facilitate the deployment and execution…

May 31, 2018 / 10 min

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Add a metrics monitoring service to your resin.io multicontainer application

With the release of multicontainer on resin.io, it's easier than ever to integrate new components and functionality into your projects. In this tutorial, we'll walk through extending our Getting Started with Multicontainer demo project to include fleet-wide metrics and monitoring capabilities using an external InfluxDB service. By the time we finish, we'll be able to monitor and trigger alerts on…

March 23, 2018 / 6 min

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Filters and tags: a fleet management primer for resin.io

The resin.io platform is designed to make it as easy as possible to develop, update and monitor code on remote devices, whether your fleet contains one device or thousands. Those with growing fleets know that as the size of the fleet increases, the more difficult it becomes to organize and sort your devices and to find specific devices as needed. To address this, we’ve added two incredibly useful…

January 26, 2018 / 5 min

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Top 6 tips for troubleshooting your host OS with resin.io

We recently released a feature that gives you a lot more visibility into your remote devices running on resin.io. For those with resinOS versions 2.7.5 and above, it is now possible to SSH into the host OS. This can be done directly from the dashboard or through the CLI. Host OS SSH access gives you a handful of tools that can help you gather more information about potential issues. To help you…

January 16, 2018 / 4 min

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Deploy a digital signage application with Screenly OSE and balenaCloud

Update June 2019: This post has been updated: read the latest version here This post was written by the team at Screenly, which makes it easy to deploy digital signage applications on the Raspberry Pi. Screenly is used by hundreds of companies to power thousands of screens around the world. Be sure to check out the video tutorial at the end of the post! UPDATE: Screenly OSE now ships with support…

November 21, 2017 / 5 min

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Open Source Guide #2: Code Quality and Static Analysis

This is the second post in a series on best practices and tools for open-sourcing a project, based on our experience building Etcher and various other projects at resin.io. We'll be covering topics including documentation, code quality, community building, error tracking, and so forth. Let us know if there is anything specific you would like to see! And check out the first post in the series on…

August 29, 2017 / 7 min

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Deploying a gateway for The Things Network using resin.io

This article was written by Matthew Macdonald-Wallace of [Mockingbird Consulting](https://www.mockingbirdconsulting.co.uk" target="\blank). Mockingbird Consulting provides workshops on a wide range of topics and is committed to inspiring the next generation of engineers. Their "Internet of Threes" program helps organizations understand how people, places, and things are all part of a successful…

August 29, 2017 / 6 min

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Move to the edge with Azure IoT and resin.io

The benefits of running services on the edge—fast response times, low bandwidth, the ability to work offline—make this approach an attractive alternative to a fully cloud-based model. But there are some things to think about before moving to the edge: How do you keep the development process simple, so you don't have to rewrite your code for devices with different operating systems or architectures…

July 08, 2017 / 4 min

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Manage a fleet of drones

with resin.io, AWS IoT, & NodeJS This article was authored by Excelion Partners, a tech consulting firm located in Wisconsin that specializes in full-stack, globally scalable IoT solutions. Project source code and additional files available on GitHub. Fleet management concerns, such as securing, updating, and controlling a multitude of devices, are paramount to the success of any IoT initiative…

June 20, 2017 / 8 min

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Advanced Device Provisioning Workflow for Large Fleets: Preloading and Pre-provisioning

Editor's Note: This post was updated on January 25, 2018, to remove a statement that flasher type devices are not supported in the pre-provisioning workflow, as this limitation no longer exists. Let's imagine you have a factory where you are creating resin.io-enabled devices that need to function when they first boot up. Maybe your devices have to function even before they are able to connect to…

March 31, 2017 / 9 min

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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

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ElectronJS with Raspberry Pi Made Easy As Pie

As we often point out at meetups and talks, the origins of resin.io go back to digital signage applications. We've since been focused on improving remote device deployment and management for all types of applications, but have only recently revisited the digital signage use case. Carlo, who is very experienced in the area of digital signage, developed resin-electronjs, an Electron-based template…

March 08, 2017 / 9 min

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Open Source Guide #1: Documentation and JSDoc

This is the first post in a series on best practices and tools for open-sourcing a project, based on our experience with Etcher and other such projects. We'll be covering topics including documentation, code quality, community building, error tracking, and so forth. Let us know if there is anything you would like to see! Documentation Documentation is key to a successful open source project. It…

January 05, 2017 / 7 min

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Safely Migrating Away From "prepublish" with npm 4

The prepublish script in npm has been contentious for quite some time, and in npm 4 it's finally been deprecated, in the first step on the long road to a real fix. If you're currently using prepublish to ensure certain tasks get run before publish though, actually putting this into action in a development team isn't as easy as it sounds. The original prepublish script problem was that it not only…

December 19, 2016 / 3 min

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Tick-Tock, Says the System Clock

Recently we have had a couple of in-depth conversations with resin.io users about how exactly is the system time managed on a device. It all boils down to using systemd for time management and interacting with the time service over dbus messaging. Time Synchronization When the resin.io device boots up, and before any container is run, the system will query the hardware clock to get the current…

December 13, 2016 / 3 min

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Use the API, Luke!

The thing about platforms is that everyone wants to use them in their own way. No matter how many features are built in, there will always be people who need something that isn't there or works differently from the defaults. This is why at resin.io we have an API which covers the device and application management tasks you would otherwise do in the resin.io dashboard, thus you can build the tools…

December 08, 2016 / 6 min

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Our Dockerfile Tips & Tricks

Last week was Docker Global Mentor Week 2016, a great initiative by Docker to help users improve at all skill levels. Docker is one of the key technologies in the resin.io stack, and we've found that there are a lot of Docker related best practices, tips, and tricks which can dramatically improve the resin.io developer experience. Docker already has a Best Practices collection, however not all of…

November 22, 2016 / 10 min

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Using Microsoft Azure IoT with resin.io

Microsoft has published an open-source SDK for their Azure IoT Gateway that enables gateway-connected devices to communicate with Azure IoT Hub. It is also really simple to wrap this SDK in a resin.io project so that remote devices using the Azure IoT service can be managed safely and easily. Resin.io is a platform that brings modern container-based development and deployment to the Internet of…

November 01, 2016 / 3 min

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Our Resinified Office Lock

If it's Friday, then it's usually time for Friday Hacks at resin.io! This means working on a project of our own interests - as long as it is connected to resin.io in some way. We have many dozens of hacking and maker ideas floating around in our team, there's always more to do than how many Fridays there are. My most recent Friday Hacks project was adding an RFID lock system to our local office…

September 16, 2016 / 4 min

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Fleet-wide Machine Metrics Monitoring in 20mins

Great! Our click bait title worked! But seriously stick around, this tutorial will get you a Prometheus + Grafana monitoring setup for resin devices in no time. So a couple weeks ago we kicked the tires of Prometheus to see if it's monitoring capabilities could be extended further than stock servers to the real world of dispersed IoT devices. We created a resin application that ran the node…

August 04, 2016 / 6 min

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How we updated a drone while flying - and how you can too!

Dockercon 2016 took place in Seattle just a short while ago, and we were really excited (and slightly nervous) to be invited to the main stage for the conference's closing keynote, the Cool Hacks section. We demoed live updating the software running on a drone, while being in the air, mid-flight. Here's the video of what happened there, check it out! In this blogpost I hope to untangle what…

July 14, 2016 / 8 min

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Monitoring linux stats with Prometheus.io

This is the first of two tutorials on monitoring machine metrics of your device fleet with Prometheus.io. prometheus Prometheus is a tool, initially built by soundcloud to monitor their servers, it is now open-source and completely community driven. It works by scraping "targets" which are endpoints that post key-attribute machine parseable data. Prometheus then stores each scrape as a frame in a…

July 06, 2016 / 7 min

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No hardware? Use VirtualBox to simulate a device for balenaCloud!

We receive quite a few inquiries from people wanting to use balena on their own developer machines in a VM. Maybe the board you're using is still in the mail and you can't wait to get started? Or perhaps you'd like to try balena with a fleet of devices, but don't have enough boards. This post will show you how to use an x64 NUC image to create one or more virtual balena devices with VirtualBox…

July 05, 2016 / 4 min

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End-user controlled updates

The standard deployment flow for resin.io is completely automated, meaning that when you push an application to resin.io it is built, downloaded and automatically started on every device in your fleet. This is great, it allows for the "git push and forget about it" mentality, and satisfies the most common embedded use cases. However, there are use cases where more control is required, in cases…

May 26, 2016 / 2 min

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ARTIK & ARTIK Cloud tutorial

Yesterday, during the opening keynote for SDC we released official support for the Samsung Artik 10 & 5. With the help of our partner Snappin.io we put together a live demo which you can watch below. In this post, we'll run through a minimalist version of our onstage demo to illustrate how to update your ARTIK with speed and safety. In particular, we’ll learn how to: Setup an ARTIK device with…

April 29, 2016 / 8 min

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Updating an Arduino with resin.io

Micro-controllers are simple boards that can run C/C++ programs. They are easy to use and amazingly power efficient, but their simplicity typically makes them incompatible with resin.io since the resin service requires that a board can run Linux in order to manage Linux containers. A couple of weeks ago, however, one of our users explained how they were using resin.io to update their Raspberry Pi…

January 13, 2016 / 4 min

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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

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Building ARM containers on any x86 machine, even DockerHub

Back in 2013, we ported docker on ARM. Shortly afterwards, we wanted to use that to offer ARM builds to our users. However, ARM server hardware at the time was difficult to find and so we started looking for an emulated solution. Enter QEMU. QEMU is a wonderful project aimed at emulating other CPU architectures. It has two modes of emulation, system emulation and user emulation. In system…

December 25, 2015 / 12 min

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A guide to cellular connectivity on resin.io devices

⚠️ Update 2016 Nov 28: WARNING!!! A lot has changed on resin.io since publishing this post, please do not use the setup outlined in this post! For wireless connectivity, we recommend using resinOS 2.0, which is currently in beta on our staging environment at dashboard.resinstaging.io. The plan is to release resinOS2.0 as production ready around the middle of March 2017. Let's face it, an IoT…

November 27, 2015 / 3 min

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How to create a custom logging system for longer log retention

Sometimes an application requires a large amount of logging, which can make sifting though logs on the dashboard tedious. There may also be a need for longer log retention and, in that case, better search functionality. To begin with, as part of resin.io's testing suite, I created an automated testing rig to perform tests against all our services using real hardware. Based on the frequency and…

November 19, 2015 / 4 min

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Running the LDA algorithm on a Raspberry Pi: The resin.io way

Imgur Ilias is a new member to our team and an experienced data scientist. As is customary with any new member, he built a project using resin.io and gave us his thoughts on the experience: I've always wanted to play with a Raspberry Pi, mainly because of the many OS images out there that enable you to use your device as a lite Linux machine, a home entertainment center or whatever you like…

November 10, 2015 / 4 min

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How to configure a static IP address with resin.io

Note: These instructions only apply to resinOS 1.x. For the latest on configuring a static IP address with resinOS 2.x, please refer to our documentation. Recently a number of users have asked us how to set static IP addresses on resin.io devices with use cases ranging from a strict firewall which blocks traffic from all but whitelisted IP addresses to setting a stable IP address for easy SSH…

October 27, 2015 / 5 min

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Scheduling updates with resin.io

Last week we open-sourced our supervisor and released it's own API, which is a massive step in enhancing control of your devices running in the wild. The resin.io supervisor is a device-side agent that, for lack of a better word, supervises your application. It runs all resin related tasks. One task in particular which is both important for the purpose of this post and resin.io in general, is…

October 23, 2015 / 2 min

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Continuous integration on your devices

Deploy to Resin from GitHub using Travis CI We've heard from several users that it would be nice for Resin to "watch" a GitHub repository and deploy directly from there to Resin-connected devices. So we prepared a simple demo project that uses Travis CI to accomplish this. Another benefit is centralized build logs. We are working on native feature where all builds are accessible from the UI rather…

October 12, 2015 / 2 min

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Introducing resin.io wifi-connect

Update your device's wifi configuration from your phone Resin.io gives you an easy way to configure wifi before downloading and provisioning a device. This is great - but this doesn't work when your device is going to be deployed in a customer's network, where you don't know the credentials in advance. For this reason we built resin-wifi-connect, a simple production-ready tool that allows you to…

September 07, 2015 / 4 min

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Demystifying native node.js support & its caching caveats

As you may already be aware, resin.io offers native support for node.js. What this means is that you can push an ordinary node project and resin.io will build and run it on your devices without any modification. In contrast, a non-node.js project requires one to add a Dockerfile to a project to instruct resin.io how to build and run the container and subsequently your application. So how do we…

September 02, 2015 / 5 min

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Where is my code running?

This is the second in a series of blog posts looking at topics raised by our resin.io users drawn from our discussion platform, Resin Talk. Today's topic is the customisation of builds depending on where code is being built. The inspiration – Disabling resin-specific scripts in your package.json – discusses how to adapt a node.js project to detect whether a script is being run locally, on our…

July 23, 2015 / 3 min

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PagerDuty for device fleets

In any part of the process, from the first line of code to v1.0, it is in a the developers best interest to outsource commonplace tools instead of building and maintaining their own. Today the cloud has reached a maturity where DevOps is for the most part handled by a set of tools. This makes tasks more automated and reliable. Meanwhile the embedded world lags behind. In part resin.io serves to…

July 09, 2015 / 1 min

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Where are my devices?

UPDATE: Our new base images automatically populate /dev correctly, so your devices will be immediately accessible without the steps described here. However, they are still necessary for custom base images and of course it's always interesting to explore what's going on under the hood, so sit back, relax, and enjoy :) This is the first in a series of blog posts looking at topics drawn from our…

July 07, 2015 / 3 min

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Eternal applications with pm2 and resin.io

Last week one of our users Robin Remuer asked a question in our community forum. Robin wanted his node app to run continuously, automatically restarting the process if it hits unexpected errors. And I see why running remote devices daemon to monitor your processes on those devices is essential, unless you're the type of guy who loves spending his Saturday watching logs scroll across a screen…

June 11, 2015 / 3 min

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Two-Factor Authentication in the real world

The Internet of Things is mostly about bringing Things to The Internet, but it's also about bringing The Internet to Things. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) has been offered by mission critical services websites like bank accounts or Bitcoin wallets for some time now, providing an additional layer of security beyond just a password. Since resin.io is all about crossing the gap between the internet…

April 09, 2015 / 6 min

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Convert SMS to speech with Twilio, Raspberry Pi, and Resin.io

This project allows to receive SMS sent to a Twilio number and then converts them into audible speech with google text-to-speech, on your Raspberry Pi. Step 1. List of materials For this project we will be using: A Raspberry Pi (any version) Headphones or speakers alt text Step 2: Create accounts Resin.io Create an account in resin.io and follow the instructions on the “getting started guide", in…

April 09, 2015 / 4 min

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Custom Base Images for your Fleet

One of the questions that has been popping up quiet a lot lately is, "Can I build my own base images?". "Debian isn't my cup of tea, can I build my own base images?" We here at resin.io love Raspbian/Debian and that is why the default base images are always built from this base. However, if you are looking for something off the beaten track or want to run some more hipster level OS on your devices…

February 27, 2015 / 5 min

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Resinify an existing project

This article serves as a quick reference on how to resinify your existing projects. Why should you resinify your projects? Well it allows you to push updates to your linux devices from the couch while you sip on some hot coco. It also gives you a bunch of other developer super powers, but let's concentrate on the hot coco for now. There are 3 steps needed to convert any project to a resin.io…

February 24, 2015 / 6 min

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Email address + GitHub API = public SSH key

We're building our user signup flow which does something awesome, but unexpected, so this serves as a short explanation to link to. After verifying their email with Resin.io, some of our users will see a "get from GitHub" link under the public key textarea. Clicking that link gets the SSH key automatically filled in by our system, without further user action. While it may be unusual, there's…

December 20, 2013 / 1 min

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Docker on Raspberry Pi in 4 Simple Steps

ANOTHER UPDATE: We've since released resin.io as a full service allowing you to easily run and update docker containers on multiple architectures. UPDATE: We've since released Docker 0.7.2 for ARM. Read More One week ago, we released our instructions to installing Docker on the Raspberry Pi. The response has been fantastic with a lot of excitement but also some feedback that the installation…

November 18, 2013 / 4 min

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Docker on Raspberry Pi

Deprecated: We've since released balena.io as a full service allowing you to easily run and update docker containers on multiple architectures. See https://balena.io/ for more details. At balena.io, our goal is to simplify development for the Internet of Things. One challenge we’ve faced is deploying applications to devices. It’s okay when you have just one or two devices, but once a deployment…

November 09, 2013 / 8 min