balena monthly roundup - June 2019

The v11 release of the balena CLI comes jam-packed with exciting new features to supercharge your balena workflow. Check out our blog post here to see how livepush changes the game.

Check it out

One of the little known secrets of the CLI is that it includes the ability to push projects with secret keys and variables that are only mounted during build. This allows one to use secret info at build time which never makes it down to your devices. You can read more about this feature in our documentation.

Check the docs

We’ve taken a look at deploying a gateway for TTN on our blog in the past, but this time we’re going to look at setting one up using the new balenaFin with plug and play hardware! We’ll use the onboard mPCIe slot to interface with a RAK Wireless LoRa module, and use an Adafruit GPS HAT on top to give us location and timing information, then we’ll deploy the software using balenaCloud to allow us to remotely manage and update the gateway.

Find out how

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, Matthew McGinn from our team takes a look at monitoring your entire fleet using Prometheus and creating a dashboard to visualize the metrics with Grafana.

Monitor your fleet

Last month balena user Alex Markessinis released a project based on balenaSense to manage the temperature and humidity of a data center and upload the data to an external InfluxDB database. Check out this project to find out how to pull information from a fleet of sensor nodes and bring it all together in a central database.

Deploy all the sensors