Welcome to the balena community repo. A place to find out how to get involved in the balena community and all the resources you could need to create your own IoT community meetup.
- Contribute Create a project, write a blog or join in the discussion on our forums
- Start your own IoT meetup Find like minded individuals in your area to hang out and talk shop with
- Become an Ambassador Find out more about the balena Ambassador programme and apply to join the team
- Create a project tutorial
- Share build logs, tips and tricks
- Help others on the forums
- Help maintain balena projects
- Contribute to balenaHub
- Explore events
- Host your own event or meetup
- Become an Ambassador
- Share your projects on social media
You’ve probably seen our guides on the balena blog, on the Forums, or on sites like Hackster. Sharing a tutorial is one way to show off your prototype or production-grade projects built with balena. All projects should include clear build steps, links to working code, and a list of materials that help users build a usable replica of your project. You can publish the guide on our own site, the Forums, or get in touch and we can set you up with a community contributed post on the balena blog.
- Prototyping a GPS tracker with openbalena
- Using PiHole with balena
- Kerberos’ independent guide/docs
- Build your own Minecraft server on a Raspberry Pi
Many users who contribute these guides are also motivated to add their Project or Fleet to balenaHub (click on the link for more information).
Many ongoing and/or half-completed projects can be amazing teaching moments. If you have something you are or have been working on that isn’t quite finished, but you want to share your experiences, we encourage that as well. Sharing build log steps on the blog or the Forums is also a great way to meet other community members and get some help on your balena project.
- RTK GNSS Base with balena prototype
- balenaPlant Forum discussion (this discussion and build log ended up becoming a complete project)
Our users post requests for help daily on the balenaForums and we’re always amazed to see how many threads are solved by other community members. We encourage anyone to do this as it helps solve problems together, but also gives people new opportunities to meet and work with one another.
We keep our eyes open for community members who go above and beyond consistently and want to reward them for taking the extra time to help.
All growing platforms start to experience the difficulties of maintaining Projects and Blocks. We invite any interested community members to help our balenaLabs team. GitHub repo links are available for every Project or Block to go learn more details and take a look at the code.
Ways to help include:
- Creating useful, detailed issues in balena-io and balenaLabs repos (we have a snazzy template to help with this)
- Dependency updates and maintenance
- Addressing issues in repos
- Bug fixes
- Adding device or component support for projects/blocks
For example, the balenaSound project has a healthy record of Issues and PRs created and addressed by our wonderful community members and staff.
For the most ambitious community members, we invite you to contribute your amazing app to balenaHub, our catalog of ready-to-use edge projects. We’ve recently updated balenaHub to support self-serve submissions of Fleets, Projects, and Blocks to make the contribution process smoother. Visit the balenaHub site to learn more.
Check out our events calendar, we have all of the events or conferences we are attending listed here as well as events and meetups that are being hosted by our community members.
EVENTS CALENDAR WILL BE HOSTED HERE
If you are attending or hosting an event and planning to speak about balena, submit your event to our events calendar and at the same time you can apply for support to attend or swag to giveaway.
No IoT meetup in your local area but want to meet other like minded developers? Check out our 'Start your own meetup' checklist and resources, reach out for support.
We have set up the Ambassador Program to recognize and empower community members who have made outstanding contributions to the balena ecosystem. Our goal: to continue building with balena and to inspire our community. Find out more about our ambassadors in our here.
Applications to join our fantastic team of ambassadors are now open! So, if you’re a balena developer building IoT and edge projects, participating in our community, fixing bugs via GitHub, and/or helping out balena users, and you want to get more involved, let us know by filling out this form.
We love seeing what you've been working on, tag us on so we can share it with the rest of the balenda community on social media or in our monthly newsletter. You can find us on: