Recent posts

Monitoring an IoT Fleet

6 minute read

IoT devices are inherently distributed across many locations. One of the worst things that can happen to them is that that they suddenly go offline and an ex...

Playing Hide and Seek with QEMU

4 minute read

Have you ever wondered why you can run an arm64 Docker container on an amd64 host machine? Magic? Did you also run into the situation where most of the thin...

Managing an IoT Fleet with GitOps

5 minute read

In a previous blog post I showed that it is surprisingly easy to manage an individual IoT device. In another post I described how my OS images get built, dis...

Surprisingly Easy IoT Device Management

3 minute read

A while ago I wrote a rather theoretical post about using GitOps for embedded devices. This time it is hands-on: With the tools Mender, git and Ansible I tur...

Debian for Embedded Systems - Seriously?

7 minute read

On a regular basis I come across “white papers” and presentations that compare the usage of Debian to solution XY for embedded use cases. There I read claims...

Beyond the Raspberry Pi

5 minute read

Imagine you have a great product idea and you start to implement it on the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. Since you are already familiar with the Debian operating ...

Documenting Releases

1 minute read

At some point a new software release gets finished - and the development team is sure that it is the greatest ever compilation with plenty of new features an...

Embedded Meets GitOps

5 minute read

This blog post presents a down-to-earth approach to tackling the challenges of modern embedded systems that are …

Getting Started with a new Embedded System

5 minute read

For a desktop PC you can usually just download a generic Linux iso image and install it on your off the shelf hardware. This is unfortunately not the case fo...

CI and CD for Debian and Ubuntu

2 minute read

Developing some new features for edi is the fun part. Releasing it for two Debian and three Ubuntu releases is the boring part and it took me around two hour...

Cross Compiling for Raspbian Buster

6 minute read

Guessing from the number of clones on GitHub my cross compilation setup for Raspbian stretch still seems to be pretty popular. This makes it worthwhile to mo...

Announcing edi 1.0.0

less than 1 minute read

Development of embedded systems has become more complex over time and nowadays groups of developers interact with a lot of infrastructure to get the work don...

Real-Time Linux on the Raspberry Pi

4 minute read

Some ten years ago I learned that it is possible to turn Linux into a real-time operating system by applying the PREEMPT_RT patch set. I was more than fascin...

Booting Debian with U-Boot

4 minute read

Several sources (e.g. IoT Developer Survey - slide 29, Samsung Artik - see firmware and Azure IoT Edge) indicate that Ubuntu/Debian based systems are a ve...

Secure By Default ssh Setup

3 minute read

Nowadays - in the funny days of IoT - the majority of embedded devices are reachable over the network. This was not the case some years ago and therefore man...

Infrastructure At Your Fingertips

4 minute read

edi helps you to build development infrastructure but in turn it also uses plenty of it. This blog post is about the latter topic: I am still fascinated how ...

Cross Compiling For Raspbian

4 minute read

As promised in the previous blog post I will outline how we can leverage multiarch in order to speed up the compilation process for the Raspberry Pi.