Support for the Variscite DART-MX8M-PLUS

Product support balenaOS
1

Hello everyone,
the company I’m doing my internship at would like to use balenaCloud with their board - a Variscite DART-MX8M-PLUS.
I’ve checked the list of supported boards and it isn’t supported, sadly.
However, both the base and the mini models are supported.
How difficult would it be to make my own image starting from the base model’s one?
I’m relatively new to both balena and Yocto.

2

Hi @xenesys!

Thanks for reaching out. We have a good relationship with Variscite, so there might be a few options in this case…

  1. If you’re interested in getting into the weeds, we have a process for how to onboard hardware to balenaOS here. Likely some of that work is already completed in the Variscite repos so that’s a good place to start!

  2. If that’s going to take too long to complete for the timeline your company has on this project, then we could reach out to Variscite to see if they have interest in bringing that board to balena, or maybe even working jointly with you to do so. The harder part about that is keeping it updated, so we would just want to make sure we had someone listed as the Maintainer in GitHub going forward that we can reach out to for updated kernel modules, Yocto layers, drivers, etc. in the future.

  3. If neither of the above two options work, your company can pay balena to onboard the hardware and maintain it as well. Pricing for that is listed here and that Variscite board would likely be a Tier 2 board from a pricing perspective.

I hope that helps! Let us know if you have any questions, and if you go through the process of doing this yourself, please do reach out to us with questions along the way. We’re looking to make this process easier in the future, so any feedback we can get from you and others here in the Forums who go through it is incredibly helpful, and probably will be helpful to someone else reading this down the road as well. :slight_smile:

5

Thanks for the reply and sorry for the late response.

We’ve decided not to use balenaOS for the time being.
However, I’ll definitely make a thread if we ever decide to use it and make it compatible with the Variscite DART-MX8M-PLUS.