konmouz

Happy to see this thread on HN so I'll add a bit of context since many people have questions about the purpose and use cases of EtcherPro.

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Software is the core focus of our company balena (https://www.balena.io/). Formerly known as resin.io, we developed balenaCloud, a platform to build and manage fleets of IoT devices -- essentially removing friction when dealing with remote fleets (over-the-air updates, multicontainer application, etc).

As balenaCloud gained traction, one onboarding hurdle kept cropping up: people were struggling to flash OS images onto their chosen hardware platform.

Say you wanted to use a Raspberry Pi. You'd first need to use your terminal or some clunky software to download the desired OS image and flash it onto a micro SD card. Every OS had different software, forcing us to keep refining instructions, and none of the tools validated whether the write was done correctly. Next, you'd have to plug the SD card back into the Raspberry Pi and boot the system.

It might sound simple but the process was so tedious, slow and error-prone that it discouraged a good number of our potential users.

Frustration Necessity is the mother of invention and so we took the bull by the horns and made our own (open source) image writing application, Etcher, focused on user experience and speed. What we didn't know was that the problem extended far beyond our use case. As a result, Etcher now has a large community of users, supporters and advocates as it flashes about two million images per month.

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We now had a slick image writer, but what happens when you scale your fleet? Etcher can flash multiple cards simultaneously, but the process still requires a custom USB hub with SD card adapters, which severely impacts your flashing speed. As for the available industrial solutions, the consistent feedback from our users is that these are expensive, slow and clunky -- everything Etcher is not. Further, none of these legacy duplicators support Etcher's ability to flash devices without an SD card.

The writing was on the wall: it became clear to us that if we wanted to help our customers scale their IoT fleets, we needed to build a hardware version of Etcher for professionals -- EtcherPro.

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If this wall of text wasn’t enough, you can read the full blog post: https://www.balena.io/blog/taming-the-hard-in-hardware-in-8-...

or, you can watch an in-depth video presentation: https://youtu.be/pld8RSXu7ms?t=1178

> will always be an Electron app

I can't guarantee that

This setup can work well. EtcherPro is using the standard Etcher app too. The performance and the UX won't be the same, but as you said it will be much cheaper.

If the price is justifiable or not depends on your use case. But if you flash drives systematically, then you will spend way more time if you use USB hubs. Apart from the actual speed, UX is a major point. For instance, often enough drives fail during flashing and with a USB hub it is difficult to tell which ones failed and which ones succeeded.

You are spot on. We initially started by literally 'cobbling together USB hubs and multi-port readers from Amazon' but we couldn't hit the performance we wanted so we ended up designing our own hardware.

EtcherPro uses the standard open source Etcher app so hobbyists can use USB hubs to build their own drive duplicator on a budget.

- EP lead designer

Also true

That's not our intention actually. Etcher, the open source app that EtcherPro is using, keeps evolving all the time, so we wanted EtcherPro to be able to keep up. Nevertheless, EtcherPro is hackable by design, so if you have concerns you can write your own software with any level of protection you want. - EP lead designer

Yes, it's currently an electron app