Distributing Pi

Today I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out how to manage a remote set of raspberry pi’s deployed to help the product we’re working on.

I was thinking of using a home-grown system to do this, but upon searching, and some pings from some experts, it became clear there’s a lot of prior art here. Some of the options are pretty expensive, but others aren’t.

Some of the needs of our platform in general. Some of which could be addressed by these platforms:

1. OTA firmware updates
2. Protection from failed updates
3. Builds and distribution of said updates
4. Builds for Raspberry Pi
5. ideally, some sort of wifi setup framework
6. Data collection
7. Debug/development access to systems

Seeds of my search

• Particle
• Balena

Second set

• Mender - community/freeish options. Lots of setup required
  • https://docs.mender.io/2.6/server-installation/overview
  • https://hub.mender.io/t/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/889
  • https://github.com/mendersoftware/mender
• Yocto - related or integrated with Mender
• Rauc
• Upswift
• Hawkbit
• swupdated
• libostree - Docs

Another distro we could use other than traditional Debian based Raspberry Pi OS http://tinycorelinux.net/faq.html