What’s happening, folks? Here’s your monthly dose of balena-fuelled projects and tutorials! This month we’re building LoRa gateways, monitoring the edge and deploying sensors, with balenaCloud. In addition to that our community has been building robots, testing robots and running Swift on Raspberry Pi.

Take a look at all this great content and let us know what you think in the breakroom. See you next month!


News from balenaHQ

Supercharge your Dev workflow

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.


The secret secrets feature

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.


The latest from our blog

Use balenaFin to build your own LoRa Gateway for The Things Network

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.


Monitor your fleet at the edge with Prometheus and Grafana

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.


Deploy a fleet of environmental sensors with balena & InfluxDB

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.


Projects of the month

Every month we like to feature some projects from the community, this month it’s:


Events

IoT Tech Expo Europe Amsterdam, NL Jun 19 – 20, 2019
Sensors Expo San Jose, CA, US Jun 26 – 27, 2019
Artificial Intelligence, Robotics & IoT conference Amsterdam, NL Jul 16 – 17, 2019
Embedded Linux Conference San Diego, CA, US Aug 21 – 23, 2019
Hackaday Superconference Pasadena, CA, US Nov 15 – 17, 2019