Category: IoT

Running resin balena on Raspberry Pi 3

Just two days ago, resin.io announced balena their new, moby based container engine. Basically, it is a Docker-dropin-replacement for IoT Devices: It is compatible with Docker and Docker Hub, gains a lot of stabilty with atomic pulls, more conservative flash memory use - as well as smaller updates due to true container delta pulls. Also, it comes bundled as single file, is smaller in size and as easy to use as Docker. So - a very good bundle.

However, this comes with the disadvantage of losing Plugin support, Swarm, Cloud logging, Overlay networking and Non-boltdb backed stores - which is a small price to pay, as none of these features are really needed in an IoT scenario.

balena is going to replace Docker in resin.io and resinOS in the near future - but I wanted to testdrive it right now, which ended up in me pluggin my Raspberry Pi 3 inflight from Zurich to Copenhagen and getting it "flying" ;).

To get it working, little is needed :):

1.) Download and install the latest Raspbian image (Stretch Lite should do the trick)

2.) Login to the RPi and run the installer: curl -sfL https://balena.io/install.sh | sh

(Always check the file before running it to shell, to be sure nothing bad happens!)

3.)

sudo balenad &

4.) Now you can use balena like docker with the command sudo balena

The whole thing works pretty good - this short scrible is just to get it working for using it in a hackish way - a real tutorial will come as soon as I get the time to make it really persistent and auto-starting... But.. Well ;). Living on the edge comes with sacrifices :).

If you're on Docker Con and want to meet up, just send me a message via Twitter, E-Mail or the Hallway Track - see you soon ;)!

[resinOS] Build resinOS from scratch

As the time of writing, resinOS is available for Download at Version 2.0.6+rev3.dev for Raspberry Pi 3. This build, however, is nearly 2 weeks old and in the meantime, something great happend: Docker has finally updated to Version 17.03.1 - upgraded from the old ~10 (ten-ish) version - which was not that cool (and without Swarm ;)). So, it is a good idea to get to know how to build your own resinOS in case you really want to live on the bleeding edge ;).

Install Dependencies (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS)

sudo apt-get install gawk wget git-core diffstat unzip texinfo gcc-multilib \
     build-essential chrpath socat cpio python python3 python3-pip python3-pexpect \
     xz-utils debianutils iputils-ping libsdl1.2-dev xterm

goto /, because this build will create very long filenames

cd /

clone the repo, maybe some root power is needed here 😉

git clone https://github.com/resin-os/resin-raspberrypi
cd resin-raspberrypi
git submodule update --init --recursive

you would be done here and could build your own resinOS with the build command,
however, if you really want to pull the latest upgrades...

cd layers/meta-resin
git checkout master
git pull
cd ../..

finally build resinOS for Raspberry Pi 3

./resin-yocto-scripts/build/barys -r --shared-downloads $(pwd)/shared-downloads/ --shared-sstate $(pwd)/shared-sstate/ -m raspberrypi3

after quite some time, you'll find the image in

build/tmp/deploy/images/raspberrypi3/resin-image-raspberrypi3.resinos-img

 

There is quite a lot of stuff you can change on your resinOS, so be sure to check out https://resinos.io/docs/custombuild/ for more documentation on that topic. Have fun :)!