This is a Raspberry Pi

It ain't much ...

Devices like these power...

CO2 sensors, farms, smart dustbins, cars, locks, your room, home devices...

and more like this...

Underwater drones, satellites, parking, and your talking wireless speakers

The challenge

With smart cities & even your toaster running applications.
The stakes have never been higher

While building software is hard.

Building hardtech projects
are painful

Hardtech project

• Hard as in difficult to build
   
• Hard also as in physical hardware.
   
• Involves hardware + software to create physical products
   
• Solves real-world problems

Challenges

• Projects have to be feature-complete at launch.
• Tough to get started as investments are required to get over MVP, safety, testing & regulatory hurdles.

• Customer conversion at the start is essential for survival.

• Each iteration can be slow, expensive & deadly. 

• Requires full-stack teams to tackle technical complexity and R&D requirements.

• Scalability, IP protection & mass production.

• Supply chain issues & chip shortage

If "software eats the world"

Hard tech gives the teeth

How to
Build for
Hardtech?

And, not burn down.

The journey of open-sourcing our hardtech project

A journey of 5 years, multiple maintainers and half million dollar in R&D spending

BalenaOS

We support over 100+ embedded devices.

Testing Operating Systems
(Not ideal)

• Manually flashing OS on the device
• Running tests 
• Reporting back results to Test DB
• Takes a week or more to test a release

The Tester

2016

• Proprietary hardware, test framework, and jig firmware
• Nonstandard connectors 
• Custom test board designed by the Resin team
• Testing on the Raspberry Pi 

DEVICE UNDER TEST

THE TESTER
called Autokit (prev. Testbot)

2020 (I joined Balena!)

Tight feedback loops between environments

Open Source Hardware

• Open Source Hardware involves:
  • Hardware design: mechanical drawings, schematics,
  • Bills of material, PCB layout data, HDL source code
  • In addition to software that drives the hardware are all released under free/libre terms.

Current Stage: Open-Source Hardtech

In peak Covid, we build a hardware testing rig

The results?

Benefits of OSH

Tooling makes iterations easier

• 3D printers prices had dropped from $20,000 to $200.
• Circuit board print & design services exist to make and ship components overnight.
• Similar to the rise of APIs, AWS and “no-code” that unleashed new applications for software, similar revolutions are the backbone of the new hard tech world.

Onto building software
for the hardware

Reproducible Self-Healing Setup

• Recovery of the device is better than crash looping
• Proper crash reporting pays dividends
• If you have to reboot, then you are doing wrong

Building Fault-Tolerant
Applications

• Handle intermittent network issues gracefully.
• Prevent excessive bandwidth consumption.
• Don't be using your swap memory. 
• Connect your peripherals on runtime, not bootime

But Vipul, how can I use this now at work?

It's not going to be easy.
 

• No one wants to give away a competitive advantage.
• Not for free, anyway.
• Take steps to become open-source friendly in your team.
• Start a conversation about the benefits you can get from creating a community around your hardtech projects
• Do incremental changes show tangible value which will be the real changemaker.

And, that's about it!

Questions? Collaborate? Work with us? Reach out!

@vipulgupta2048

Reviews cheesecakes, solves GitHub issues & "rights" docs