These days Raspberry Pi becomes the “second choice” of every connected IoT device project in many different industries – from smart kiosk screens to robots and Ai city cameras. Thanks to the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s last new board releases, it is now easier than ever before to develop a Linux based connected device without spending plenty of time on choosing hardware and building a custom Linux based Operating System for it.
Today’s 2021 Raspberry Pi single board computers and compute modules, enable us to focus on the software side, thus significantly shortening the development cycle. Moreover, the affordable cost of Raspberry Pi makes it suitable for big scale projects with tens to tens of thousands Raspberry Pis at a price point of $20-$40 for each single end-device.
This brings us to an interesting question that lately becomes essential to answer as part of the project software stack.
What is the best way to manage Raspberry Pi devices remotely?
To manage Raspberry Pi devices remotely, there might be many valuable features that can help us maintain a deployed product fleet while keeping the Raspberry Pis stable and secure 24/7.
Here is the 3 top solutions to manage Raspberry Pi or any other Linux based IoT device remotely:
Solution #1
Upswift.io IoT device management platform
Upswift provides an all-in-one device management solution for connected Linux and IoT devices. One of the big advantages of the Upswift solution is the ease integration – it takes less than 60 seconds to connect a Raspberry Pi to the platform.
Here are some of the many great tools the platform includes:
- Over The Air updates – tools to deploy software update to the Raspberry Pis
- Remote SSH and VNC – tools to access the Raspberry Pi terminal and desktop remotely outside of the local network.
- Remote commands – tools to run commands remotely.
- Monitor – tools to monitor the Raspberry Pi resources, processes and data.
- Device management – a place to arrange devices in groups, with name and location for each and every device.
With the Upswift platform we can deploy and manage thousands of Raspberry Pi devices remotely by using all the needed features to receive product alerts, debugging and patching devices.
They also provide a free prototype plan – https://www.upswift.io/
Solution #2
In case of a small scale project – up to tens of devices, and zero project budget, we can consider to develop a VPN network between the Raspberry Pis and a VPN server that is controlled by us. This solution is recommended just in case the Raspberry Pi “lives” in a stable network environment and runs tiny applications that shouldn’t be maintained.
Here is a guide of how to build your own VPN network.
This option required self development and maintenance.
Solution #3
Develop a complete solution to manage the product fleet remotely. In that case, we will need to develop 2 major parts:
- Agent side – a software that is running on the Raspberry Pi and communicating with the cloud.
- Cloud application – a server software that receives requests from the Raspberry Pi and “doing” actions accordingly.
This option might demand a few development months to get the desirable solution.
Conclusions
In any path we chose: developing your own solution or going with a ready-to-use solution, keeping the devices managed remotely can save unwanted product recalls and uncertainty.
