Mender blog

We recently launched Mender 2.7 which introduced optional add-on packages, containing a set of features for solving other device management use cases. These packages include device Configuration and Troubleshooting features. With Configuration you can customize each device to its environment and with Troubleshooting you can resolve issues with your devices in real-time, all securely and effi...

There was a very interesting talk at the recent Yocto Summit about how you can do debugging on hardware. Sergio Prado, a consultant and trainer from Embedded Labworks, explains how to leverage the Yocto Project to debug an embedded Linux system . It is a very impressive talk and this is something that we would really recommend that you look into. If you were going to do serious debugging on hard...

There are some special considerations if you want to get efficient Yocto development and your OTA update system. The most important is managing the time it takes to build the whole image when using the Mender client with Yocto. Even when making a one line change somewhere, it will take at least 2 minutes to get the new image. If your team is doing a lot of iterations to the image, then two minut...

Boards are often ranked based on the popularity of the board and we would rate that quite high in selecting something that's workable, that's going to have answers online, for problems that you're going to run into. Be aware of stability and power issues, and look carefully at Raspberry Pi in comparison to Beaglebone Black in this regard. The power source is a noted challenge in the Raspberry Pi f...

What should you consider in a provider for a Yocto OTA update? Your OTA software updates solution for a Yocto layer should be as non-intrusive as possible. This is a design principle that is front and center with Mender so the OTA software update manager should fit neatly into what you're building without being in the way. This will not always be the case with other OTA software update options...