Balena workshop

Edukacja i Rozwój Hackademy 🏫
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This is the spot to discuss anything about the upcoming Balena workshop (5 October; Discord). If you want to attend, I would advice you to follow this thread to stay up to date.

Reactions: :whale: ×3 (DoomHammer, Leszek, 𝓚𝓲𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓻)

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@Bakashi SQ2BKA @pgrenda @wiczi @DoomHammer @Leszek please follow this thread if you don’t do so yet (and intend to be there on Thursday)

During the workshop I will first talk for about 20 minutes about Balena and how it’s useful for us makers, and then we’ll dig in by making Balena accounts and running stuff on our Raspberry Pi’s. What you’ll need:

  • Laptop
  • Some way to write an SD card
  • SD card (that fits into your RPi)
  • RPi – any RPi is supported (as well as most other single-board-computers), although life becomes easier if we all bring RPis with wifi, so 3, 4, 5, Zero W or Zero 2W
  • Some way to power RPi (either from laptop or through external power supply)
  • If you want a cool demo: bring wired headphones (well, I assume it will be a cool demo since I don’t have wired headphones, I have not been able to test it :))

I have some spare hardware for people who don’t have some things, let me know if this is the case!

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will you be using my Pi or can I use it? :sweat_smile:

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Did I not give it back yet??? :flushed:

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I don’t know if I’ll be able to get a respery pi. So if you can lend it to the workshop, that’s great.

Reactions: :+1: ×1 (Claude)

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you did, just making sure it’s free then

Reactions: :+1: ×1 (Claude)

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pizza anyone?

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I just had a late lunch :persevere:. So maybe 1 or 2 slices but that’s it for me!

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@hereanybody else?

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Have fun at the workshop tonight, looks fun/interesting but could not attend due to short notice. I just read: Introducing Project TinyMiniMicro Home Lab Revolution - ServeTheHome which was quite interesting if you are looking for something a bit more powerful than a PI, also cost per spec compares quite favourably.

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@Claude will there be some kind of transcript/slideshow available afterwards? I couldn’t make it but would love to read up

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Balena_hackerspace_presentation.pdf

Reactions: pink_heart ×1 (𝓚𝓲𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓻) · :mechanical_arm: ×1 (Jedrzej)

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We quickly discussed it in our meeting: can you run HomeAssistant through Balena. I had exactly this requirement last weekend, so I can now officially say: yes you can… However…

You run the container-version of HA, and this seems to have some limits in using add-ons: Installation - Home Assistant. It seems to be not impossible (however I haven’t really tried it yet), but at least the happy-path is not working…

Secondly, HomeAssistant has a single /config directory, which contains both config files, and log files, and database, which makes it very annoying to split these out. I would love the proper config (what devices do I have, what rules, what automations, what dashboards) to be in Git and be deployed inside the built container.

On the other hand, this (obviously) does not make sense for the other things.

I feel one should be able to make things work by having /config be a docker volume, and then in docker-compose have another container overwrite the config with the latest from github before homeassistant starts… Or maybe update the homeassistant docker image to first copy in the latest config.

Anyways, just documenting my 2cts…

Reactions: :+1: ×2 (DoomHammer, RafaAutomation)