Announcing Mender Hub! | Mender

We are very excited to announce Mender Hub: a community-supported repository to enable OTA updates on any board and OS. Our goal is to create the world’s largest repository to enable a secure and robust OTA update process for connected devices. Please join us today and be part of writing the history in securing the world’s connected devices.

There is no out-of-the-box update solution for the many diverse types of embedded devices on the market. Mender Hub has been created to ease board integrations for OTA with IoT developers and open source enthusiasts in mind. By creating a home for community-made Mender board integrations, you can help share the knowledge and make it possible for the community to have an OTA solution, whatever their device. Device manufacturers provide different chips, supported OSes, custom bootloaders and even proprietary ways to boot the board. This makes it very difficult to integrate support for robust system updates to a variety of boards. Typically, this has been a manual job for each of their customers. Today, this stops and with your help we can make it much easier for everyone.

The increasing connectivity of devices makes a secure and robust OTA update process an absolute requirement. Unfortunately, IoT developers don’t have the luxury of time required to integrate their board with a comprehensive and robust update process. Rather, they need to focus on their product’s core functionality. Mender and now Mender Hub allows IoT developers to prioritize their core competency while easily integrating a trusted OTA update process. A common scenario is many developers take risky shortcuts by developing an ad hoc homegrown OTA update mechanism, leaving their update process insecure and brittle. There are many real-life examples of what happens when updates go wrong with connected devices, such as the update that bricked smart locks recommended by Airbnb or Chrysler’s reboot issue after an update that caused constant rebooting, draining their vehicles’ batteries.

Enter Mender Hub: a home for our community to develop Mender integrations for as many boards as possible. We hope to cater and foster a community where developers can reuse and share their integrations, with the end goal that secure and robust OTA updates are easily enabled on any embedded device, regardless of board and OS.

We have created Mender Hub to address this unnecessarily widespread problem and to encourage a community approach in the spirit of open source to develop out-of-the-box integrations to various boards in order to OTA enable them with an open source OTA update manager, Mender. Developers need a community-supported repository to reuse tested and validated integrations for their board to receive secure and robust software updates.

Want to contribute? Check out Mender Hub today. If your board is not yet there, please contribute! Your integration can be reused by the wider community and be further developed. We look forward to seeing you on Mender Hub.