I am completely new to balena so forgive me if this is a stupid question…
I have just set up a raspberry pi 3 with balena and I can see it as “online” on my balena cloud page.
I have another device (not connected to balena at all) which has a serial console to which I have connected the raspberry pi througha USB-to-serial converter.
Now, had I been running Ubuntu or something on this raspberry pi, I would have been able to ssh into it and start minicom (or picocom) on it with:
picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0
Is there a way to do this through balena? I find the structure of balena very useful, it is easy to reach the device, but can I run a terminal program on it an connect to another device like this?
On Production images that serial console is not started, but you can add an SSH key to your device configuration file (config.json), and thus would be able to connect to the device locally over SSH as well. The required config.json entry is documented here https://github.com/balena-os/meta-balena#sshkeys
I don’t want to connect to the serial console on the raspberry pi, I want to use the raspberry pi, to connect to the serial console on a different electronic device.
Then that should work fine, of course. You have to have your application install the relevant tools (minicom, etc), and make sure that your serial device is available for the relevant application container, see this part in the docs: https://www.balena.io/docs/learn/develop/hardware/#interact-with-hardware
@frepe360 it depends on what base image you are using for your application. See our documentation regarding the base images we maintain here: https://www.balena.io/docs/reference/base-images/base-images/ There are Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, Fedora base images to choose from, and all of them should have minicom packages.
And not sure what you mean weather it’s a “reasonable” way to get this functionality - creating your application image is the way of deploying an application onto a balena device. We’d recommend checking out the “Develop” section of our documentation https://www.balena.io/docs/learn/welcome/introduction/ to learn about how to create your application and get it onto a balena device. If you run into any issues, don’t hesitate to ask!