Preloaded Containers - Burn & Ship

Last week I visited FWR, one our customers based in Milan, building snappin an advanced digital signage solution in a market they have coined as the 'Advertising of Things'.(I say coined, because I tried googling the term).

They have a pretty great provisioning system using the resin.io's CLI and their own services to create a GUI application that allows staff at their factory to, in a few clicks, provision a new device for incoming orders. However once the device is provisioned they still have to wait for the applications container to download before boxing and shipping to the customer, a substantial delay in a seamless provisioning process.

Our supervisor now supports running a preloaded application before registering with the resin.io API. This means your devices can be provisioned with an application's code loaded up and ready to go on the very first boot. Saving you bandwidth and time in the factory, and in an extreme case even allowing your device to function without ever been connected to the Internet.

To preload an image with your applications container, you'll need to use this script to inject your application into a standard resin .img file. The script currently only runs on Linux but we are working towards including this functionality into the our API and dashboard, so you will be able to download an image with a preloaded application of your choice.

It's little changes like this that we hope can help you make really big improvements in your process. Of coarse if there are improvements we can make that could improve your system please let us know.