balenaFin Developer Kit Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Assembly Instructions

balenafin power rtc battery

Balena launched balenaFin 1.1 at the end of last month. The board is a professional carrier board for Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 / 3+ Lite that includes support for variable voltage power input, optional PoE, industrial eMMC flash storage, a real-time Arm Cortex-M4 core via Artik-020 module, and more. Somehow a balenaFin 1.1 developer kit ended up in my home, and I’ll play with it in several weeks, but in the first part of the review, I’ll just check out the content of the package, and show how to assemble the kit. BalenaFin 1.1 Developer Kit Unboxing The local courier brought a largish balena Fin package. which contained a smaller balenaFin package, and the actual developer kit. Everything is nicely packaged in the box with the part related to power supply in a white box, a small opening for smaller accessories and Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, as well […]

balenaFin Raspberry Pi CM3+/Lite Developer Kit Launched for $179 and Up

balenaFin 1.1 developer kit

Balena.io – previously known as resin.io – first unveiled Resin.io Project Fin in March 2018. The carrier board for Raspberry Pi CM3L was designed with the aim of easing the management of fleets of connected devices thanks to ResinOS operating systems and the ability to deploy apps packaged in containers through their balenaCloud service. The project had been renamed to balenaFin a little while ago, and the company has now announced availability of balenaFin 1.1 developer kit with various improvements including support for PoE, dual camera, and Raspberry Pi CM3+/Lite module. balenaFin v1.1 carrier board specifications with improvements highlighted in bold: Supported SoM Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 Lite with Broadcom BCM2837 quad-core ARM Cortex A53 processor at 1.2GHz, 1GB  RAM Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+/Lite with Broadcom BCM2837B0 quad-core ARM Cortex A53 processor at 1.2GHz, 1GB  RAM Storage – 8, 16, 32, or 64 GB industrial grade eMMC 5.1 […]

Balena EtcherPro Multi SD Card, USB, and Board Flasher Coming in Q2 2019

Balena EtcherPro

I previously wrote about Etcher Pro when posting about the fairly expensive SySTOR SD card duplicator that allows you to copy one (micro) SD card content to multiple cards on one go, for instance to speed up the process of flashing firmware for multiple single board computers. Made by the team behind the popular Etcher firmware flashing tool, EtcherPro promised to be a more cost effective solution, but there was not a lot of details at the time. Balena – previously resin.io – has now written a bit more about the project progress in a blog post. EtcherPro is a standalone hardware device, meaning no PC requires – with a user interface based on Etcher GUI, and allowing to copy a micro SD card, SD card, or USB flash driver to 16 destinations in one go thanks to USB 3.0 ports and SD card sockets. What makes the products even […]

RushUp KITRA Board Family is based on Samsung Artik 020, Artik 520/530, or Artik 710 Modules

Kitra-520

Samsung first announced their Artik IoT modules almost three years ago,  and until recently most Artik related products or development kits came from Samsung themselves, with no third party involved. But this has started to change recently with announcements such a Seeed Studio Eagleye 530s low cost development board based on Artik 530 module, and Resin.io Project Fin combining RPI CM3L module with an Artik 020 module for low power Bluetooth connectivity. But as I flicked through Resin.io supported hardware, I discovered they also supported Linux powered Artik 520 and Artik1020 module,  as well as some new “KITRA” boards I had never heard of, and if we visit RushUp company website, we can see they have a bunch of Kutra boards and one IoT gateway based on Artik modules: KITRA 520 – Samsung ARTIK 520 product accelerator for advanced IoT KITRA 710 – Samsung ARTIK 710 product accelerator for advanced multimedia […]

BalenaFin is an Industrial Carrier Board for Raspberry Pi CM3L Module Designed for Fleets of Connected Devices

Resin.io-Project-Fin

[Update January 2019: Resin.io Project Fin has been renamed to BalenaFin, I have not changed the rest of the article] Resin.io is a both a company and a software platform that includes device, server, and client software to get code securely deployed to a fleet of devices.  Devices are setup to run ResinOS, and to deploy you app, you just need to push the code to resin.io build servers, where it will be packaged into containers and delivered to your fleet of boards. So far, resin.io relied on existing hardware platforms like Raspberry Pi 3, BeagleBone Black, or Intel NUCs, but they’ve now decided to launch their first hardware with Project Fin that takes a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 Lite, is hardened for field deployment use cases, and adds some of most commonly requested hardware features such as variable supply voltage support,  RTC, and cellular connectivity (via mPCIe card). […]

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