Dumb idea: balenaBlock or inclusion of rpi-eeprom-update check for RPi4

General
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Hi, I think I saw this already being talked about in the Yocto issues, but never really solved (I think…) - but, just wanting to give the idea here:

We bought a bunch of 4-5 RPi 4 (2 GB) about half a year ago for usage in our company - followed by about 14 more about 2+ months ago (still not delievered :cry: ).
I installed one of the RPi 4 this morning with balena-browser and nginx for some own application (a specialized wall clock I hacked together).
Sadly I found out that the complete system (within a Raspberry Pi 4 Case…) had crashed hours later because of heat issues. It was running on my personal RPI 4 (8 GB… with proper cooling :wink: ) without issues and had very reasonable CPU load (about 10%…). So I decided to boot with latest Raspberry Pi OS and figured out it was still rocking the 2019 release firmware (the one which was running too hot) - so… even a RPi 4 bought now could still have the old, buggy firmware… I updated it and added a small heatsink - but actually I think it wasn’t necessary anymore, that thing is working fine now.

So, the idea is - how about a balenaBlock with the latest rpi-eeprom-updater (for running it once before deployment?) or this function included in balenaOS for RPi 4? This could really help with heat issues and other problems …

I have so no time at the moment for anything in this way, but I thought I might post the idea and maybe someone would find it interesting.

Cheers

Nico

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Hello Nico,

Good news, our colleague @anujdeshpande already started working on this but other priorities got in the way. You can find the WIP repo here (include-eeprom-tools branch)

Hopefully a community member finds this useful and can contribute to it. It would make a great block indeed.

Thanks

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Thanks rahul and anuj,
thats great news.
The WIP repo is still protected / private so cannot be seen by the community.
Sadly I cannot join forces here as I am a bit in a pinch, but I wanted to get the idea out - I guess a future Fin on CM4 would also need this feature so that it works reliably, hence - why not getting this out as fast as possible :slight_smile:

Cheers and thanks for getting back to me,

Nico

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Thanks Nico - I didn’t notice. will make the repo public