Fleet independent lobby for new devices

New devices could come online in a separate fleet lobby where they can later be assigned and moved to a fleet. Each organization should have a lobby by default.

The lobby could have following features:

  • Add device (Download OS image)
  • Identify (LED blinking)
  • Assign to fleet
  • Forget (e.g. device shuts down)
  • Details (Added on dd.MM.yyyy hh:mm, online status, IP, MAC, …)
  • Set device name

Devices in the lobby should not count as active on invoices.

This would enable faster deployments by preflashing devices with a base balenaOS and later assigning it to the appropriate fleet. It could also prevent high costs if an image or flashed drive gets in the wrong hands.

Chris Crocker-White: Cool idea - not sure this is something we have discussed before! Thanks for submitting!

Vipul Gupta: I have been personally doing this by running a fleet of devices with no releases grouped by arch. I call it my holding fleet (better word thanks to you - fleet lobby). I can see the disadvantage being that they will get billed for doing nothing.

The closest thing we might have for this would be preregistering a device: Balena CLI Advanced Masterclass | balena, but it doesn’t provide all the additional features you mentioned above.