As we’ve written about in the past, balena uses an “Intentional Work Framework” where we pitch our ideas to the team in the form of “bets” and try to select the ones that will be most impactful for the coming cycle.
Vastly improved NVIDIA Jetson Orin provisioning experience
While we are proud of our versatile and powerful tool for flashing Jetson devices known as Jetson-flash, it has a few shortcomings. Notably, it requires an Ubuntu host or VM along with Docker installed in order to flash an attached NVIDIA Jetson device with balenaOS.
We now offer a vastly simpler solution for provisioning an NVIDIA Jetson Orin with balenaOS: simply download a flasher image, write it to a USB stick, insert the stick in the Jetson Orin device, and boot from it! This new flasher image will not only install balenaOS on the internal storage of your choice, but it will also write to the device’s QSPI flash to ensure the device always boots to the proper drive.
There are a few requirements and options when using our new flasher images, so do read the instructions provided when downloading a provisioned image from the balenaCloud dashboard.
Jetson configurable device power modes
Jetson Orin customers on JetPack 6 can now use the device configuration page on balenaCloud to select Jetson Orin power modes and fan speed. In addition to specifying low, medium, or high for the power model, NVIDIA device-specific power model identifiers (such as MAXN) can also be used. This new feature is available on Supervisor versions greater than or equal to 16.10.0. For more details, check out the docs.
Documentation versioning
The documentation for our CLI and SDKs are now versioned. This means that you can choose the version of the documentation to match the major version of the CLI/SDK you’re using. You’ll find a dropdown on these pages with the available versions listed. We believe this will make it much easier for our users to find the exact documentation they need for their particular development workflow.
Improving the notes experience
It’s now possible to use markdown in the device and release notes in the balenaCloud dashboard. Specifically, the “notes” and “known issues” fields of the “Releases” page, and the “Notes” field on the “Device Summary” page.
Here’s an example of a field in edit mode:
Note that there is a link to a popup Markdown cheat sheet for your convenience.
In view mode, the entered Markdown will be rendered for viewing:
BalenaCloud table improvements
Our UI team has done it again! In their ongoing efforts to improve the user experience, they have restyled all of the tables (device list, releases, etc…) to improve readability and provide additional benefits, such as better pagination and visibility on the number of selected items. We plan on drastically improving the tables in the future by adding better column management, easier filtering and more.
That’s a wrap on our most recent development cycle! We look forward to sharing details about our next cycle in the coming weeks.
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