Oh my, it’s hard to believe it’s only been a month since we last emailed as so much has happened! We’re excited to give you all a quick roundup of everything you shouldn’t miss out on.
Perhaps the biggest news of the month is that we closed our series B investment round which means we’re now looking to grow the team and have a bunch of open positions.
We’ve built a cool digital photo frame for Apple/Google/Dropbox, taken a deeper look into storage for IoT devices and made mini-train time signs for our desks. If you’re interested in AWS, we took a look at deploying devices to connect to the AWS IoT platform using balena, too.
On the community side of things you guys are on fire as always and have been continuously building and sharing your projects using balena – we love checking these out and sending swag for the coolest ones!
News from balenaHQ
Join us in our mission, from anywhere in the world
Since we just closed our investment round, one of our first tasks will be growing the existing team. We’re a remote-first team based all around the world and whether you’re an engineer who wants to work on impactful projects or someone with expertise in growth, marketing or sales, who wants to help us spread the word; we are looking for talented people across many areas of the business.
If you’re interested in helping us shape the future of IoT, check out our careers page and get in touch.
See our open remote work positions
Balena secures $14.4m to grow team and bring edge computing to every developer
We’re incredibly excited to announce that we’ve just closed a $14.4m Series B investment round, led by OpenView with participation from our existing investors including Threshold Ventures, Aspect Ventures, and GE Ventures.
Shaun’s tips and tricks
Each month, our head of product experience Shaun shares tips and tricks for getting the most from the balena platform, this month we will talk about a new feature wherein balenaOS v.2.20.0 we introduced the ability to add custom SSH keys to the OS. This feature allows one to access the hostOS on production devices, and coupled with the balena tunnel feature from last month lets you easily remotely SSH into all your production devices using your standard ssh-agent. If you have a few devices already deployed and want to remotely add an SSH key, check out our cheeky ssh-key-insert script!
The latest from our blog
Why is the balenaFin right for fleet owners? Part 1: Storage
This is the first of a series of posts about the key features that make the balenaFin the right choice for fleet owners. For all those who are not 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, networking and power. In this post we looked specifically at the points to consider when choosing a storage solution for the balenaFin, the design choices we made and the reasoning behind those choices.
Use a Raspberry Pi to communicate with Amazon AWS IoT
In this article, we go through the steps to setup a basic MQTT broker on AWS IoT and configure a Raspberry Pi to communicate with it. In the end, you will have your device sending and receiving messages from the cloud service and a simple python boilerplate code that you can modify to fit your needs.
Build a smart photo slideshow with balenaCloud
We released an updated to balenaDash that enables you to run a photo slideshow hosted on Google Photo Albums, Dropbox Photo Album, or Apple Photos. The main objective of this addition is to create a physical photo album that is easy to build, configure, and maintain. Once configured, there is nothing else you need to worry about. If you edit the album, add or remove photos, the album will automatically update to display the latest photos.
Build a Raspberry Pi powered live train station sign for your desk
Build your own UK train station platform departure display (next train indicator) with live data using a Raspberry Pi Zero, 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.
Projects of the month
Every month we like to feature a few projects built by the community, this month it’s:
- Magic Mirror: 🧙 First up, we have a project by @idoodler to make the popular Magic Mirror project run on balena.
- Home Assistant with balena and more: Next, we have a couple of contributions by @tmigone, the first is an article describing how to deploy Home Assistant with balena and secondly an addition to balenaDash allowing you to show photos from a USB stick and an associated article discussing hot-plugged USB devices in balenaOS.
- Backup Windows to External Drive: @janvda shared a project using rsync on a balena device to create backups of Windows (samba) shares to an external hard disk.
- Monitor a Raspberry Pi using Rust, Prometheus and Grafana: Rahul shows us how to monitor a Raspberry Pi using Rust, Prometheus and Grafana.
Feel free to give them a try and let the world know how you get on in the forums; the authors of these projects would love to know how you’re using them.
Events
| Embedded Linux Conference | San Diego, CA, US | Aug 21 – 23, 2019 |
|---|---|---|
| Internet of Things conference | Bilbao, ES | Oct 22 – 25, 2019 |
| Hackaday Superconference | Pasadena, CA, US | Nov 15 – 17, 2019 |
