Hardware update announced by ‘balena’ for fleet owners managing connected devices

The company that provides the infrastructure to manage fleets of connected Linux devices, ‘balena’ has officially released the ‘balenaFin’, the carrier board designed for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 & 3+.

The announcement, made on the company blog, coincides with the launch of the v1.1 revision, featuring many improvements to the original v1.0 board. Initially started as Project Fin about nine months ago, it evolved into the board now known as balenaFin. It’s a carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 and 3+ (CM3/3+) Lite, which means balenaFin can run all of the software that the Raspberry Pi can run.

Balena’s stated mission is “to unlock the potential of physical computing by removing the friction faced by fleet owners when developing, deploying, managing, and updating fleets of connected devices.” The company said in its post that it’s become obvious that hardware was “an issue” for a lot of fleet owners. Users often get stuck between two non-ideal options – either go with the Raspberry Pi, “which is incredibly successful and developer-friendly but not necessarily intended for commercial and industrial applications”, or try their hand with a “serious” industrial board, which comes with its own set of problems, and is often more expensive and difficult to use.

balena v1.1

Project Fin took off in March 2018 and was made available to balena Cloud customers with challenging use cases. There were now nearly 1,000 balenaFin boards deployed across a variety of use cases, from smart manufacturing and drone base stations to home automation and digital signage. hardware revision.

Here are some of the new features in the latest version:

Dual camera capability The DSI connector on the balenaFin has dual functionality. It can act as a camera port or as a display port, allowing for stereoscopic camera functionality
PoE compatibility (802.3af) balenaFin is now PoE compatible via a HAT (not included)
USB headers An additional USB port exposed through headers. This can be leveraged by custom balenaFin HATs for extended functionality
Single cable flashing The micro-USB debug port can power the balenaFin for flashing with a single cable, which previously required a full power supply. Note: the debug port can’t be used for powering the device in operation
Improved operating temperature range We’ve extended the temperature range from -20°C to +70°C for use in a wider range of environments.
Image Credit: balena

 

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