Hello there, readers!
We’re proud to share how we help Infarm build the gardens of the future. Imagine that: deploy thousands of IoT microfarms to bring better produce to stores and restaurants.
From the lab, we’re showing people how to build a solar-powered LoRa weather station and how to send and receive station data between their gateway and balena device. If you’re interested in adding cellular to your next IoT project, read this investigative piece.
As always, we’re highlighting interesting community finds and have a few opportunities open to join our team. Take care out there!
News from balenaHQ
Helping Infarm make farm-to-table work
Learn how Infarm uses balena to deploy and manage thousands of remote “microfarms,” bringing fresher produce to local community stores and restaurants. Delicious.
The latest from our blog
How to add cellular service to a Raspberry Pi
Cellular IoT projects aren’t as expensive or complicated as they seem. See how our teammate John built a project with balena and Twilio and what they learned.
Build a solar-powered LoRa weather station
Building upon our recent LoRa work, we decided to explore a solar-powered weather station that any hacker or maker can deploy. Once you build the station, use this guide to send and receive data between your gateway and a Raspberry Pi.
Charlie’s Tips N Tricks
When deploying releases to your fleet of devices, sometimes it might be necessary to provide passwords, tokens or keys which you definitely do not want deployed to your end devices. The balena push command allows defining secrets which get exposed to the image build, but not propagate down to devices.
To use build secrets, make a subdirectory .balena in the root of your repository which should contain a balena.yml file and a secrets subdirectory. Secrets are defined in secret files and can exists as global secrets which are exposed to all services or can be defined per service in the balena.yml file.
Learn more on how the secrets are mapped in containers at build time and the lifecycle of secrets in our docs.
Projects of the month
Can you build a LoRa gateway in ten minutes?
Huge props to our community member Maria for setting up a The Things Network LoRa gateway in less than ten minutes. Way to go!
Catch a hands-on cellular IoT demo
During this IoT Happy Hour, we showed our community how to set up cellular IoT using balena and a Twilio Super SIM.
Big thanks to IoT North for inviting us to chat
Catch up on our latest community chat about machine learning and IoT.
We love being a part of the curriculum
Looks like this user is on the start of a beautiful balena journey. What will they build next?
Job opening: Lead Security Engineer
We’re looking for a number of roles for our growing team. Could any of these fit you?
Check them out or introduce yourself to us via open call. We’d love to get to know you better.
Hang out with us
Join us for IoT Happy Hour
We’re postponing our physical events to practice safe social distancing and keep our team safe and healthy. Instead, meet with us virtually during our weekly IoT Happy Hour!
Every Friday at 16:00 UTC, join our live stream to see IoT project builds, discuss hardware and software, talk shop, answer community questions, and more.
Start the discussion at forums.balena.io