I, myself, can be an annoying pedant, so I'll just tl;dr that the grand total of 160 SD cards and/or USB drives is achieved by daisy chaining these units, provided that all 160 images to be written are from one single source image.
Provisioning lots of Raspberry Pis would be a use case, so definitely less and less a consumer-level device as the scale of output climbs. Such is the entire field of computing hardware.
It might useful for brands who want to distribute 'swag' with USB flash drives with their logo on it, and some software flashed to it, to promote their product.
I do love the idea of these, but at that price ($990) I'm afraid our church will stick with 16-port USB hubs and my horrible, cobbled python script to rsync a folder to them.
Looking at the price, it's probably justified, but hard to switch when I have a working solution that was $23 + a couple hours of coding.
Depends on how much value said time has, and how much of it one is willing to donate. I, for one, wouldn't mind burning two dozen USBs/SDs each Sunday with some cobbled-together hardware and software. I'm pretty sure that 12-port or more powered USB hubs can be gotten quite cheaply.
If the price is justifiable or not depends on your use case. But if you flash drives systematically, then you will spend way more time if you use USB hubs. Apart from the actual speed, UX is a major point. For instance, often enough drives fail during flashing and with a USB hub it is difficult to tell which ones failed and which ones succeeded.
It’s clearly meant for a commercial or a funded setting. As a hobbyist even if you have a bunch of SBC’s you need flashed like if you are building a Pie cluster for some reason or you have a bunch of them for automation you still would only do this once, so it taking 10min or an hour isn’t a big deal.
If you are pumping out 100’s or 1000’s of these a week yet alone a day you are probably making money of it or supporting an activity that does.
$50.00 USD (deposit)
balena EtcherPro full price will be $990 + VAT (if applicable) and shipping. Your pre-order deposit here will be deducted from the final price.
neat tool if this is actually a need. the expansion/cable management looks pretty slick.
on a related front, I do sometimes wish that I could burn a lot of CDs all at once, but not often enough that I am going to buy a $1000 piece of dedicated hardware. One at a time with ImgBurn it is!
> I do sometimes wish that I could burn a lot of CDs all at once
That used to be the case when CD-based piracy was rampant and you had groups with literally 1000s of CD-writing burners to mass produce pirated copies of movies/software/music etc
Now the use-case for this Balena device would mainly cater to brands wishing to promote their product with a custom USB flash drive logo and some software/promotional material found on the drive
So all the default configured access.log files for all the Apache and Nginx servers out there are spyware?
I'm kinda confused by this point because any time your computer makes a TCP connection to another host, that host knows what time it is, and knows what your IP address is.
I think the point is that for an application writing a local file to a local disk that should not be required to run. Even just prompting or asking would be fine.
Actually, Wikipedia's definition of spyware makes a point in the intro that this behavior may be present in malware as well as in legitimate software and concludes that because these behaviors are so common, and can have non-harmful uses, providing a precise definition of spyware is a difficult task.
You make it sound as though they aren't still collecting data and the only things they've ever collected are IP addresses and timestamps. That's not accurate context.
Thank you! I didn't know this and it leaves me feeling conflicted. I haven't used Balena Etcher in a while, but I used to use it all the time. I've been using the official tool from Raspberry Pi lately. I wonder if their tool does this.
calculating how many times a person clicks "download" on their website times a guesstiamted number of cards a person would also give a good enough estimate without any telemetry
If this is the bar for spyware then I've got bad news for anyone browsing the web, even with javascript disabled.
I find the intersection of users who monitor network requests like a hawk but download 150mb apps to run dd hilarious.
I'm not even anti electron, you can pry vscode from my cold dead hands, but I've always been confused at the popularity of balena etcher in the first place.
so that means it's ok for the website to collect way more data than etcher?
and since it's open source, you can actually remove any home-calling and have a perfectly functional software, but you can't change anything on this website.
Forgive my ignorance but what are the use cases for a device such as this? Are there specific industries or organizations that this is aimed at? Is it something that would be used by consumers/hobbyists for particular projects? Any insight is appreciated!
Kind of old school, but if you were going to give out usb drives at a trade show with a demo/app/video of some sort on it. A lot of rural America doesn't have fast broadband, so this would make it easy to distribute something without worrying about the internet.
Handouts at conventions or other events; provisioning large deployments in a corporate environment; vendors shipping media to customers who need it in physical form (computers don't come with optical drives anymore, and sometimes you can't download); small/medium-scale manufacture of embedded/IoT devices.
Just envisioning some uses off the top of my head.
I've wanted the Etcher Pro to come out because I used to manage dozens of IoT devices, it took the better part of two days to flash operating systems onto them before I could deploy them into the field. The Pro would've made that process take minutes instead of days!
$1k is basically nothing to a business compared to the cost of paying some muppet to write 50 SD cards at short notice. Especially as it’s a one-off cost.
At my previous job we’d have recouped the cost within a couple of months at the most, and the sanity of whichever person was assigned to do the cards.
A usecase that comes to mind is the general secondary school exams here in Finland. The exam is digital and done in a purpose-made OS, booted from usb-sticks. So every time a new version comes out, every school has to update their hundreds of sticks. Something like this is already used, but seeing as the exam authority already recommends Etcher software I can see this having a market.
It might useful for brands who want to distribute 'swag' with USB flash drives with their logo on it, and some software or media flashed to it, to promote their product.
On use case I'v seen is live concerts that record the show and sell the show you just saw to you on a USB stick at the merch table on your way out the door.
I actually had a need for this at my last job - I first heard about this 2-3 years ago and we would have loved to have it. At the time I worked for a company building music studios, and we had at least one IOT device in every room. Commissioning a building meant writing somewhere around 20-50 micro SD cards, which was pretty boring and rather time-consuming.
if you have any product shipping with storage you need a way of flashing it. There are different ways of going about it:
manufacturers offer pre programming, its an added cost and might have MOQ requirements
your factory offers to build an automated programming jig, again makes sense at a certain volume level
you and a bunch of friends and family sit around and program the stuff manually for couple of days straight
TIL £1000 for 16-port media duplicator is cheap. Competitors seems to be charging three times or even more. $3499 for a 16x2 LCD and a glorified USB hub!? $7800!?
This setup can work well. EtcherPro is using the standard Etcher app too. The performance and the UX won't be the same, but as you said it will be much cheaper.
I used to use Balena Etcher for writing bootable media, but have started to use Ventoy[1] for this instead. It's really nice to be able to have multiple bootable ISOs on a single flash drive (and also keep using them for regular storage at the same time).
Balena Etcher (the same software that runs on the Balena Etcher Pro) is an Electron app that can be used on standard computers.
If you use Etcher as a way of switching the same installation drive to install a different OS by re-burning the install image, then Ventoy totally makes sense.
This looks like a professional grade tool for their target market at a reasonable price point. If you’re trying to write 100s or 1000s of cards per day the amortized cost of this becomes negligible very quickly.
For those complaining that it’s more expensive than cobbling together USB hubs and multi-port readers from Amazon: You’re definitely not the target market. If you have a scaled manufacturing or even prototyping facility, having an engineer spend a couple days cobbling together scripts and instructions to do the same thing as well as maintaining it on the floor will cost more than this device. On the other hand, if your a hobbyist with plenty of time but limited budget then this isn’t for you.
> For those complaining that it’s more expensive than cobbling together USB hubs and multi-port readers from Amazon: You’re definitely not the target market.
Then again, if I was wanting to burn 1000s of cards a day, I would probably do what everybody else does and create/contract an actual manufacturing process. This seems to fall in the niche between somebody that just happens to flash a lot of images and businesses at scale that do 1000s and it seems like it's a bit of a perilous position.
> Then again, if I was wanting to burn 1000s of cards a day, I would probably do what everybody else does and create/contract an actual manufacturing process
In practice, lead times are long enough and release cycles short enough that it can make sense to have these devices at point of manufacture so you can ship with the latest software image.
Imagine you order 10,000 pre-flashed SD cards for your project but half way through the production run you decide you need to change the software. Do you discard thousands of SD cards and re-order a new batch? Or do you buy a couple of these and simply add it as another station on the assembly line so you can get back to production right away?
If you are ordering 10k + pre-flashed SD cards then you are an enterprise. On first run the user must download an installer to download the most recent bugs and features. That is how things are done.
It doesn't sound like you have much experience in manufacturing.
No, you don't pull a run of hardware mid-run to rev their firmware unless there is an absolute shitstorm which would also just be handled by the manufacturing process i.e. why would you ship the "bad" cards to your office or some such scenario rather than run them again through the same at-scale manufacturing process?
Anyways, as somebody already pointed out, the vast majority of these cases would be handled by live updates.
I agree. We only do on the order of 20 to 50 a day but only a few times a year. Having something like this would help a lot. Not that it can't be done on a computer but when in a rush and perhaps traveling or in the field having a one-to-many sd card cloner / writer is super helpful. The price isn't that bad considering people pay that much for a new cell phone each year.
You are spot on. We initially started by literally 'cobbling together USB hubs and multi-port readers from Amazon' but we couldn't hit the performance we wanted so we ended up designing our own hardware.
EtcherPro uses the standard open source Etcher app so hobbyists can use USB hubs to build their own drive duplicator on a budget.
You can use the standard unix 'dd' tool to copy images to sdcards and usb-drives. You can literally `dd if=whatever.iso of=/dev/rdisk3` (or whatever your disk id is). I have done it dozens of times. It doesn't give you a progress indicator, but I don't need to do this often anyway.
The pro version does make sense thought, I just can't imagine a long running manufacturing process where the SDcards are arriving faster than I can write to them.
i once messed up the disk ID and fucked my system by accidentally confusing the usb drive with a disk and since then I've just used etcher or other gui tools, simpler and safer.
also what I like about etcher in particular is that it always seems to correctly identify usb drives even if some other tool has messed up the partitioning. I'm not the kind of person who can remember all the cli commands.
If you make an open source project and support comes from your free time, etcher is a perfect tool. Take the 3DShacks community for example, the users just want to run homebrew for their bootleg games or to cheat in pokemon. They do not care about the intracies of formatting a disk or want to stand up a linux computer. Etcher is a one-button tool that just works and won't create additional work for the nice people volunteering their time as helpers in the community.
Unless you are a very rare person indeed, you presumably liked that your linux computer's OS had an installer to handle all the busywork for you, because installing the OS is not a project that interests you. Personally I am a big fan of compilers that prevent me from having to mess around in machine code. All of computing is abstracting and making things easier and I do not really get why Etcher in particular always attracts these 'i dont get it' comments when this exact microsm is the basis of our entire profession.
> why Etcher in particular always attracts these 'i dont get it' comments when this exact microsm is the basis of our entire profession
Because if you are creating some bootable media, it's not difficult to assume you are installing something on a raspberry pi, creating some bootable disk to mess around with your or someone else computer or phone, working on an embedded device, etc, etc. Basically I assume you know what a terminal is.
Maybe I am just too old, but I can't imagine downloading and installing a 430MB (just checked) GUI tool that runs one command.
Your example (gamers) makes sense though, and this should be a lesson for me.
Let me just spend the next 15 minutes reading the man page for dd. But before that, let me figure out what a terminal is.
A few minutes later...
"The dd utility copies the standard input to the standard output. Input data is read and written in 512-byte blocks. If input reads are short, input from multiple reads are aggregated to form the output block. When finished, dd displays the number of complete and partial input and output blocks and truncated input records to the standard error output."
There are several excellent reasons why dd is also called the "disk destroyer". I lost data once, because it was the wrong /dev/sd* in the command line, where Balena Etcher makes it harder to mistake the target devices. Besides, a progress indicator is always nice even if it doesn't speed anything up just by being present.
I don't understand why I'm being downvoted. Is my attitude coming across as smug? Am I being punished for being a critic of a classic Unix utility? To be clear, dd is a fantastically flexible tool, but there are tools that better and more safely serve a subset of its functionality. Right tool for the job and all that.
Talk to an IT lab manager in a school how much time they might spend on flashing cards, or an SBC reseller or a business that does IOT integration…
It’s not even about can you keep up with the rate manually it’s about is it cost effective, $1000 is what 50 hours at $20 per hour? That thing pays for itself in any setting.
from what i can tell, the pro version is fairly hackable - you can literally write software that will sense what's plugged into it and do something with that. for example, you can plug an oscilloscope into port 1, a DMM into port 2, a 3d printer into port 3, power your circuit from port 4, and you have a "brain" that controls your entire setup as well as reads inputs from your measuring equipment, might be far-fetched, i'm just spitballing ideas here
Interestingly I saw someone not even a day ago on HN asking for _exactly_ this kind of product, complaining that everything that looked even remotely close was some whitelabelled endlessly rebadged junk[0].
Weird to see people taking the exact opposite stance and asking "who is it for".
Obviously this is _awesome_ for any large deployment of Pi's.
Imagine you'rea teacher and you're giving Pi's to kids (their intended use case), I wouldn't want to write 30 cards one by one.
I've always used dd to make bootable usb sticks, but stared using Balena etcher to make the bootable sd cards for my raspberry pis and it's so darn easy. I can do it on the command line, but etcher detects the correct media to flash every time i've used it, and when I'm doing multiple sticks it just makes it easy.
This looks awesome if I were to be making large rpi clusters
I’m talking about the analytics/surveillance inside the software, not just their logs of me browsing to this page. The privacy policy page kinda bundles them all together when explaining it. There’s an in-app toggle to (supposedly) disable it, and that’s fine for people like me who are in the habit of checking the settings when I try new software, but that means I can never recommend Etcher to a friend since I know 99% of them won’t bother doing that.
- "We collect information about how you use our Service, such as the types of content that you view or engage with, the features you use, the actions you take, and the time, frequency, and duration of your activities"
- "Includes name of the device, operating system, and browser you are using"
- "Internet Protocol address, browser type and settings, the date and time of your request, and how you interacted with the Site"
Sure, sounds like surveillance to me. It’s pretty unavoidable if you have an HTTP server that collects logs (all of them), but I could choose not to participate here if it bothered me. What does a community forum’s privacy policy have to do with me not wanting to recommend desktop software that has surveillance silently in the background? Is it just supposed to be a “gotcha” that disqualifies me from having a nuanced opinion on the subject?
not at all, i'm simply pointing out the irony of you recommending people not use software that has telemetry on a platform that has the same telemetry.
i've personally refused to use etcher for a while, sticking with dd, then i got tired of slow speeds and downloaded it, blocked all its home-ringing with LittleSnitch and haven't had a problem since. There are ways around any spying, i'm just glad it doesn't install any bloatware like 90% of the "free" apps out there.
I too love some delicious irony but personally don’t see it in this case unless I disregard all context besides “their privacy policies have some of the same words”. It feels pretty different to me to compare software analytics to a thing like HN that can’t just exist offline on my PC. I know what I’m getting when I have to make network requests to read a web page, but Etcher only uses it to phone home private info like “I’m writing Ubluntu-13.37-Heavenly-Heifer.iso to a 16GB volume named ‘KINGSTON’ with serial number <whatever>”.
Automatic Updates - Your device will automatically improve over time, as we'll keep adding new features.
Why did they have to backdoor the thing? Now you don't know if it's scanning your content or extracting crypto keys and sending them to master control. It's a copier. You had one job.
That's not our intention actually. Etcher, the open source app that EtcherPro is using, keeps evolving all the time, so we wanted EtcherPro to be able to keep up. Nevertheless, EtcherPro is hackable by design, so if you have concerns you can write your own software with any level of protection you want.
- EP lead designer
I tried Etcher on linux 2-3 years ago. I would love if it had _asked permission_ before making requests back to your servers. Perhaps this is now the case.
Actually, think of it. If we have to accept Electron apps existing at all, Etcher is precisely the best possible kind of such app. One that you open, make it do its job, and close it. Meanwhile being an HTML UI it allows the creator to focus on the best operation possible and not lose time on UI shenanigans.
For comparison, the worst kind of Electron app in my opinion would be one that you have to keep open at all times, losing all the resources that Electron eats, on a "permanent" way.
I had to burn 1500 usd cards a few years ago for a project. Bought a 10 port USB splitter and 10 USB-uSD card converters. Wrote a simple script that mounted, dd'd, verified, and umounted whatever was in there. This thing is bound to be much faster, but really - the cost is in the labor.
My biggest cost savings was in buying the cards on pallets, rather than having to shuck them from packaging individually. The time to stick all the cards in the slots, and pull them out afterwards, dominated all costs associated with duplication. If I had to do it again, and IF I could have frozen the image in time, I'd have just paid a duplication company to burn them. The cost for that was smaller than the cost of the cards.
Honestly, I worked at an electronics retailer and I had to burn 200 copies of the same disk image, twice a year, for the RPI.
I can't remember if I used gnome multi disk writer or Balena etcher, but the "10x card readers on a 10 port hub" did the trick, and was relatively painless. there's no way my company was going to pay for this. Performance was limited by the SD card rather than the equipment.
Does each unit in the Daisy chain have a screen? Can you buy secondary units that don't have a screen? Seems to waste screens after the first one.
Also I'm really tired of growing acceptance of e-waste. "Burn 1000s of USBs at trade shows and throw them around" - QR codes are technology. Just print out a QR code that goes to an interactive website.
Screens are maybe ~$20 in BOM. You arent paying for hardware (its 4x pi, probably $200 total bom excluding enclosure due to molds cost), you are paying for design, polish and someone actually standing behind product and actively supporting it.
Happy to see this thread on HN so I'll add a bit of context since many people have questions about the purpose and use cases of EtcherPro.
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Software is the core focus of our company balena (https://www.balena.io/). Formerly known as resin.io, we developed balenaCloud, a platform to build and manage fleets of IoT devices -- essentially removing friction when dealing with remote fleets (over-the-air updates, multicontainer application, etc).
As balenaCloud gained traction, one onboarding hurdle kept cropping up: people were struggling to flash OS images onto their chosen hardware platform.
Say you wanted to use a Raspberry Pi. You'd first need to use your terminal or some clunky software to download the desired OS image and flash it onto a micro SD card. Every OS had different software, forcing us to keep refining instructions, and none of the tools validated whether the write was done correctly. Next, you'd have to plug the SD card back into the Raspberry Pi and boot the system.
It might sound simple but the process was so tedious, slow and error-prone that it discouraged a good number of our potential users.
Frustration Necessity is the mother of invention and so we took the bull by the horns and made our own (open source) image writing application, Etcher, focused on user experience and speed. What we didn't know was that the problem extended far beyond our use case. As a result, Etcher now has a large community of users, supporters and advocates as it flashes about two million images per month.
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We now had a slick image writer, but what happens when you scale your fleet? Etcher can flash multiple cards simultaneously, but the process still requires a custom USB hub with SD card adapters, which severely impacts your flashing speed. As for the available industrial solutions, the consistent feedback from our users is that these are expensive, slow and clunky -- everything Etcher is not. Further, none of these legacy duplicators support Etcher's ability to flash devices without an SD card.
The writing was on the wall: it became clear to us that if we wanted to help our customers scale their IoT fleets, we needed to build a hardware version of Etcher for professionals -- EtcherPro.
116 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadQuestion: how do I justify it to myself? (kidding)
Looking at the price, it's probably justified, but hard to switch when I have a working solution that was $23 + a couple hours of coding.
Again, I think this device isn't a terrible value, but a $2-300 device would be a lot sweeter proposition for my demographic.
If you are pumping out 100’s or 1000’s of these a week yet alone a day you are probably making money of it or supporting an activity that does.
neat tool if this is actually a need. the expansion/cable management looks pretty slick.
on a related front, I do sometimes wish that I could burn a lot of CDs all at once, but not often enough that I am going to buy a $1000 piece of dedicated hardware. One at a time with ImgBurn it is!
That used to be the case when CD-based piracy was rampant and you had groups with literally 1000s of CD-writing burners to mass produce pirated copies of movies/software/music etc
Now the use-case for this Balena device would mainly cater to brands wishing to promote their product with a custom USB flash drive logo and some software/promotional material found on the drive
https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/2977
And how do they know that? Correct. Telemetry.
I find the intersection of users who monitor network requests like a hawk but download 150mb apps to run dd hilarious.
I'm not even anti electron, you can pry vscode from my cold dead hands, but I've always been confused at the popularity of balena etcher in the first place.
and since it's open source, you can actually remove any home-calling and have a perfectly functional software, but you can't change anything on this website.
Just envisioning some uses off the top of my head.
At my previous job we’d have recouped the cost within a couple of months at the most, and the sanity of whichever person was assigned to do the cards.
And writing the cards can be done with Balena Etcher https://www.balena.io/etcher/
Works well enough and much cheaper than the Pro version. Using it regularly to provision Raspverry Pi-s.
[1] https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
If you use Etcher as a way of switching the same installation drive to install a different OS by re-burning the install image, then Ventoy totally makes sense.
For those complaining that it’s more expensive than cobbling together USB hubs and multi-port readers from Amazon: You’re definitely not the target market. If you have a scaled manufacturing or even prototyping facility, having an engineer spend a couple days cobbling together scripts and instructions to do the same thing as well as maintaining it on the floor will cost more than this device. On the other hand, if your a hobbyist with plenty of time but limited budget then this isn’t for you.
Then again, if I was wanting to burn 1000s of cards a day, I would probably do what everybody else does and create/contract an actual manufacturing process. This seems to fall in the niche between somebody that just happens to flash a lot of images and businesses at scale that do 1000s and it seems like it's a bit of a perilous position.
In practice, lead times are long enough and release cycles short enough that it can make sense to have these devices at point of manufacture so you can ship with the latest software image.
Imagine you order 10,000 pre-flashed SD cards for your project but half way through the production run you decide you need to change the software. Do you discard thousands of SD cards and re-order a new batch? Or do you buy a couple of these and simply add it as another station on the assembly line so you can get back to production right away?
No, you don't pull a run of hardware mid-run to rev their firmware unless there is an absolute shitstorm which would also just be handled by the manufacturing process i.e. why would you ship the "bad" cards to your office or some such scenario rather than run them again through the same at-scale manufacturing process?
Anyways, as somebody already pointed out, the vast majority of these cases would be handled by live updates.
EtcherPro uses the standard open source Etcher app so hobbyists can use USB hubs to build their own drive duplicator on a budget.
- EP lead designer
You can use the standard unix 'dd' tool to copy images to sdcards and usb-drives. You can literally `dd if=whatever.iso of=/dev/rdisk3` (or whatever your disk id is). I have done it dozens of times. It doesn't give you a progress indicator, but I don't need to do this often anyway.
The pro version does make sense thought, I just can't imagine a long running manufacturing process where the SDcards are arriving faster than I can write to them.
Takes three clicks, doesn't require me to remember how to use dd, and prevents any stupid mistakes.
also what I like about etcher in particular is that it always seems to correctly identify usb drives even if some other tool has messed up the partitioning. I'm not the kind of person who can remember all the cli commands.
Unless you are a very rare person indeed, you presumably liked that your linux computer's OS had an installer to handle all the busywork for you, because installing the OS is not a project that interests you. Personally I am a big fan of compilers that prevent me from having to mess around in machine code. All of computing is abstracting and making things easier and I do not really get why Etcher in particular always attracts these 'i dont get it' comments when this exact microsm is the basis of our entire profession.
Because if you are creating some bootable media, it's not difficult to assume you are installing something on a raspberry pi, creating some bootable disk to mess around with your or someone else computer or phone, working on an embedded device, etc, etc. Basically I assume you know what a terminal is.
Maybe I am just too old, but I can't imagine downloading and installing a 430MB (just checked) GUI tool that runs one command.
Your example (gamers) makes sense though, and this should be a lesson for me.
A few minutes later...
"The dd utility copies the standard input to the standard output. Input data is read and written in 512-byte blocks. If input reads are short, input from multiple reads are aggregated to form the output block. When finished, dd displays the number of complete and partial input and output blocks and truncated input records to the standard error output."
Excuse me, what?
After you start dd, open another terminal and enter either:
`sudo kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd$)`
Or, if you're on BSD or OS X:
`sudo kill -INFO $(pgrep ^dd$)`
https://askubuntu.com/a/215521
but etcher seems to be way faster than dd for me
bs=1M will help you.
It’s not even about can you keep up with the rate manually it’s about is it cost effective, $1000 is what 50 hours at $20 per hour? That thing pays for itself in any setting.
Weird to see people taking the exact opposite stance and asking "who is it for".
Obviously this is _awesome_ for any large deployment of Pi's.
Imagine you'rea teacher and you're giving Pi's to kids (their intended use case), I wouldn't want to write 30 cards one by one.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28141304
This looks awesome if I were to be making large rpi clusters
https://www.balena.io/privacy-policy/
https://forums.balena.io/t/serious-privacy-concerns-with-etc... (2018, also referencing a now-fixed software bug, but still an interesting look at what types of requests it makes by default)
- "We collect information about how you use our Service, such as the types of content that you view or engage with, the features you use, the actions you take, and the time, frequency, and duration of your activities"
- "Includes name of the device, operating system, and browser you are using"
- "Internet Protocol address, browser type and settings, the date and time of your request, and how you interacted with the Site"
Where in the code did you see this? I can't find that in their source.
I see they show a "banner" with this url: https://www.balena.io/etcher/success-banner?borderTop=false&...
show some featured apps: 'https://assets.balena.io/etcher-featured/index.html'
Why did they have to backdoor the thing? Now you don't know if it's scanning your content or extracting crypto keys and sending them to master control. It's a copier. You had one job.
Etcher has and will always be an Electron app.
I can't guarantee that
That said, the fact that Etcher doesn’t require you to know this is a plus.
For comparison, the worst kind of Electron app in my opinion would be one that you have to keep open at all times, losing all the resources that Electron eats, on a "permanent" way.
My biggest cost savings was in buying the cards on pallets, rather than having to shuck them from packaging individually. The time to stick all the cards in the slots, and pull them out afterwards, dominated all costs associated with duplication. If I had to do it again, and IF I could have frozen the image in time, I'd have just paid a duplication company to burn them. The cost for that was smaller than the cost of the cards.
I can't remember if I used gnome multi disk writer or Balena etcher, but the "10x card readers on a 10 port hub" did the trick, and was relatively painless. there's no way my company was going to pay for this. Performance was limited by the SD card rather than the equipment.
Does each unit in the Daisy chain have a screen? Can you buy secondary units that don't have a screen? Seems to waste screens after the first one.
Also I'm really tired of growing acceptance of e-waste. "Burn 1000s of USBs at trade shows and throw them around" - QR codes are technology. Just print out a QR code that goes to an interactive website.
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Software is the core focus of our company balena (https://www.balena.io/). Formerly known as resin.io, we developed balenaCloud, a platform to build and manage fleets of IoT devices -- essentially removing friction when dealing with remote fleets (over-the-air updates, multicontainer application, etc).
As balenaCloud gained traction, one onboarding hurdle kept cropping up: people were struggling to flash OS images onto their chosen hardware platform.
Say you wanted to use a Raspberry Pi. You'd first need to use your terminal or some clunky software to download the desired OS image and flash it onto a micro SD card. Every OS had different software, forcing us to keep refining instructions, and none of the tools validated whether the write was done correctly. Next, you'd have to plug the SD card back into the Raspberry Pi and boot the system.
It might sound simple but the process was so tedious, slow and error-prone that it discouraged a good number of our potential users.
Frustration Necessity is the mother of invention and so we took the bull by the horns and made our own (open source) image writing application, Etcher, focused on user experience and speed. What we didn't know was that the problem extended far beyond our use case. As a result, Etcher now has a large community of users, supporters and advocates as it flashes about two million images per month.
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We now had a slick image writer, but what happens when you scale your fleet? Etcher can flash multiple cards simultaneously, but the process still requires a custom USB hub with SD card adapters, which severely impacts your flashing speed. As for the available industrial solutions, the consistent feedback from our users is that these are expensive, slow and clunky -- everything Etcher is not. Further, none of these legacy duplicators support Etcher's ability to flash devices without an SD card.
The writing was on the wall: it became clear to us that if we wanted to help our customers scale their IoT fleets, we needed to build a hardware version of Etcher for professionals -- EtcherPro.
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If this wall of text wasn’t enough, you can read the full blog post: https://www.balena.io/blog/taming-the-hard-in-hardware-in-8-...
or, you can watch an in-depth video presentation: https://youtu.be/pld8RSXu7ms?t=1178