we are considering to buy Balena Fin for an industrial application. We use Raspbian as OS.
Since the Balena Fin is installed inside an electrical panel, when we turn off the panel the Balena Fin is instantaneously unpowered.
My question is: can we be confident that such shut down doesn’t damage the boot sector or in general part of the program memory so that at next power-on the board starts working properly? Otherwise should we provide with some device, like for example a small UPS, in order to grant the proper shutdown procedure?
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I would expect the Fin to be fine in such a use case, but not so much for Rasbian which can get really messed up if the device is powered off at the wrong time. I’m sincerely not trying to sell you anything here, but this sort of use case is exactly what an operating system tailored for edge devices like balenaOS is meant to solve.
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Raspbian must be formally shut down to prevent corruption of the SD card.
Likewise, you should use tune2fs to set a max mount count and max interval between forced fsck’s.
A small UPS is an excellent idea.
You can configure Raspbian to allow SSH access for maintenance and to formally shut it down when you need to take that box totally off-line.
Hi dfunckt - I’m very much interested in the Fin for one of our future iterations but currently I am limited to the Pi (3B) and have already corrupted one SD card with Raspbian. Does balenaOS ‘solve’ the unexpected shutdown/power removed problem even on the Pi without eMMC?
To the actual discussion I am also looking at the juice4halt product as it shouldn’t have any of the shipping restrictions you might face when using a LiPo battery or similar and can vouch for some UPS solution is probably appropriate for dmasinelli’s situation.