Bridging Ethernet and Wifi from BalenaCloud

Product support
1

Hello forum,

I’ve successfully deployed my first BalenaCloud project, taking RFID chips numbers from a RFID reader, and sending it on to an API on my server.

Unfortunately the RFID reader I use does not have wifi, only ethernet. And initially I was going to let the reader send its data to my server directly, but I decided to use a Pi instead to first de-duplicate the data and then send it on. With the initial setup (pre-Pi) I added a small TPlink wifi-etheret bridge to allow the reader to connect to my wifi network. Now that I use a Pi however, I’d like to plug the reader directly into the Pi.

Now since the config file for the Pi gets overwritten when using BalenaCloud, are there settings I can set in the device configuration setup or elsewhere, that would bridge my Pi’s ethernet and wifi adapters? From what I’ve read I could probably do this with a multicontainer setup, but for the moment this is a bit above my experience level.

2

Hey there, balenaOS uses NetworkManager to handle all networking, so it should be possible using nmcli from within your container. You can read about NetworkManager bridges here: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-add-network-bridge-with-nmcli-networkmanager-on-linux/

You will need to change the dbus env var as documented here: https://www.balena.io/docs/reference/OS/network/2.x/#changing-the-network-at-runtime