Happy new year! It’s great to be starting another fresh new year, but what a year 2019 was; we released balenaFin v1.1, added edge device diagnostics, released livepush, secured funding to grow our team, saw balena operated from space, and released the first 64-bit OS for RaspberryPi 4. Phew!
We’re pushing into 2020 and working hard to bring the next batch of game-changing IoT developments to production, all the while working with our mission to reduce friction for fleet owners in mind. See you at the edge! 🛫
Company News
We now support the Coral Dev Board by Google
You can now install balenaOS and use balenaCloud with the Coral Dev Board. Here’s a sample project that you can use to test things (get in touch if you run into any problems).
balenaSound: new features added
We’ve been working on some of your feature requests for balenaSound, this time around we added PIN code support and Bluetooth reconnection features. Check out the updated project and feel free to suggest new features or contributions. A big thanks to AlexProgrammerDE who’s been leading the community effort.
The latest from our blog
How to customize an LED matrix… all from a web browser
The holidays might be over, but that just means there’s plenty of time to uplevel next year’s lighting game. Use this guide to create a Pi-driven customizable LED matrix. It works for a tree, but anywhere else you need some addressable LEDs too (let’s face it, where don’t you need addressable LEDs?).
Remotely access Home Assistant sensor data with balenaSense
Imagine the ability to access your home automation and environmental data from anywhere in the world (with an internet connection, of course). Well, imagine no more because here’s a guide on running Home Assistant using balena on a Raspberry Pi!
Charlie’s Tips ‘n’ Tricks
NEW: Every month, Charlie the Unicorn takes a break from the CLI and lets us in on some power user moves.
This month, we discover how to pipe commands into balena via SSH. Very useful to quickly run a command on a device in a non-interactive way.
Community projects of the month
Every month we like to feature a few projects built by the community, this month it’s:
The tale of the bee-saving Christmas tree
Take a look at this incredible 64x NVIDIA Jetson Nano Xmas Tree build, created by the team at Apic.ai. The cluster runs openbalena and performs deep learning on video streams of bees entering and exiting their hives, studying behavior, food, environment, and other factors. It’s a great cause and an amazing project
Putting the platform to work
Here’s a great look at a user putting balenaCloud to the test– see how they manage multiple devices from one dashboard. Check out his example to see how easy it can be to manage your fleet, big or small.
Giving speakers new wireless functionality with balenaSound
Shoutout to Dimitris for putting balenaSound to the test. Did you know that it now supports Apple Airplay and Spotify Connect along with Bluetooth? Give it a test.
Job spotlight: FleetOps Engineer
Our FleetOps engineers are support-driven developers, and are renowned as the “special operations forces of support.” They tackle high-impact, high-complexity cases that affect the entire balena fleet. Does this sound like you?
Check out all our available job openings as well.
Events
| Event name | Location | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Phoenix IoTDevFest | Phoenix, AZ, USA | Jan 25, 2020 |
| The Things Conference | Amsterdam, NL | Jan 31, 2020 |
| FOSDEM | Brussels, BE | Feb 1-2, 2020 |
| HashiTalks | Online – Virtual Event | Feb 20, 2020 |
| Embedded World | Nuremberg, DE | February 25-27, 2020 |
| Scale18x | Pasadena, CA, USA | Mar 5-8, 2020 |
| Nvidia GPU Technology Conference | San Jose, CA, USA | March 22-26, 2020 |
| KubeCon + CloudNative, Europe | Amsterdam, NL | March 30 – April 2, 2020 |
