How does one create a device image for the BeagleBoard-X15 in Balena Cloud?
Or more generally, how does a commercially available 3rd party board make its way on to the list so evaluators (like myself) can play around with it?
Thanks for reaching out! This is a really good question that we should think about answering more clearly on our site somewhere, but I appreciate you sharing your situation details so I can answer more completely here.
What you can do today is this:
- find hardware you like (in this case, the BeagleBoard-X15) and try it with the OS’s already supported for it, to get a sense for how you like the hardware and if it has the features you need
- start a balenaCloud account (Free and fully-featured for the first 10 devices) and try it out on an already supported device, full list here
The reason I say this is because we try to make the experience of using balenaCloud the exact same across hardware - from an app development and remote management perspective, you won’t notice whether you’re running x86, ARM, etc. under the hood. The only differences really are when you start interacting directly with the hardware (enabling GPIO for example) that a few things will be a bit different across hardware.
But once you’ve decided a) balenaCloud is a good fit and b) the BeagleBoard-X15 has the features you’re looking for, you can start the process of enabling compatibility with us. There are a few different options:
- if you have Yocto experience, we provide the instructions for bringing the board up yourself
- if you don’t have Yocto experience, you can pay balena engineers to bring the board up and keep it continuously tested in our automated testing rig, AutoKit
I hope that’s a helpful start, but let us know what other questions you have. 
Actually, one last thought before I go. There is also a way to virtualize hardware with balenaVirt if you’d like to test and don’t happen to have other hardware around. There will still be that gap of the exact hardware enablement, but as far as high-level testing, it might be a good way to go in your case.
@the-real-kenna ,
Thanks for the reply. I do have some prior experience with Yocto (not a lot), so I may give that route a try. Thanks for the link.
Follow up question:
I see on docker hub an image named balenalib/am571x-evm-alpine-node.
That is the board I’m trying to work with.
Doesn’t that mean somewhere out there exists a balena OS host image that was used to run that alpine node container?
It means that we’ll have built an image for a device with that same SoC (I need to ask our Devices team which board that might be - it could be part of a customer’s custom board rather than something off-the-shelf). It would mean one less step in your process of bringing on board support, but still will mean the BeagleBoard-X15 won’t work fully (not all hardware and boot processes will be fully integrated) out of the box.
I’ll get back to you on that SoC at least though.
Alright, it looks like the support was for a board we’ve since discontinued. It might be a starting place for you though - here is the GH repo: GitHub - balena-os/balena-am571x-evm: Balena support for am57xx-evm boards