balena monthly roundup - July 2021

balena monthly roundup - July 2021

Hello, dear readers,

First off, we’re thankful for the adoption of open fleets on balenaHub! Keep on adding devices to open fleets or creating your own fleets– all the feedback helps us improve balenaHub for everyone.

This month, hear the balena origin story from our Founder, and check out the freshly updated balenaSense v2. On the IoT Happy Hour, learn more about Helium, and how to move your LoRaWAN gateways over to The Things Stack.

And, as always, check out some of the awesome community projects that we’ve found and see our open roles here at Team balena.


The latest from balena

The balena origin story

Our Founder and CEO, Alexandros Marinos, appeared as a guest on George Hristov’s podcast ‘Front Range Founders’, to talk about the story of balena, Alex’s operational philosophy, and his advice for young entrepreneurs.

The new-and-improved balenaSense v2

Powered by balenaBlocks, get a closer look at the improved balenaSense v2 and how it removes the friction from setting up environmental sensors and tracking and collecting their data.

A very Helium happy hour

Last month we invited the team from Helium to join us for our IoT Happy Hour to celebrate that there are more than 50.000 hotspots out there using Helium LoRaWAN network!


This month on balenaHub

Check out our most active Open Fleets, or browse them all on balenaHub.

  • Pi-Sense: Take readings from a BME680 or similar sensors on a Raspberry Pi, store with InfluxDB and view with Grafana.
  • Home Assistant: A project to deploy Home Assistant and AdGuard Home on a single device
  • Nitter: Setup your own instance of nitter, a privacy-focused, Javascript-less front-end for Twitter.
  • Helium-Light-Hotspot: Manage your Helium Light Gateway remotely using balenaCloud.

And, check out our first community-contributed balenaBlock!

  • NetData Block: – A balena block to monitor your device with netdata/netdata.

Community projects of the month

Migrate your gateways with balena

Do you need to migrate your LoRa gateways to The Things Stack? Check out this step-by-step video or download this project from community member Xose Perez that deploys The Things Stack LoRaWAN Network Server.

How much wood can a woodchuck chuck?

Check out this balena-powered, animatronic robot who co-hosts a Twitch stream and learns to sing for the first time!

Never be late again…

Balena Ambassador Nico Maas shares this cool project for tapping into a precise time source and providing it to your local computer network via NTP.


Job openings

We’re looking for a number of roles for our growing team. Could any of these fit you?

  • Fleet Reliability Engineer
  • Full Stack Engineer – Developer Tools
  • Technical Sales Lead / Sales Engineer (EMEA)
  • Technical Sales Lead / Sales Engineer (Americas)
  • Site Reliability Engineer (EMEA)
  • Site Reliability Engineer (Americas)

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. All of our previous episodes are available on our YouTube channel, too.