How to flash balena os to nvidia jetson tx1

openBalena
1

Hi,

I need help to flashing balena os to nvidia jetson tx1. Any one has the instructions?
Trying to follow the instruction on balena, but doesn’t work at all.
Do I need JetPack? But how to load JetPack with Balena OS? JetPack uses its own Linux Kernel, doesn’t it?

Juniarto

2

Hi @juniarto , can you point to which instuctions you are following? From what I know you need to

  1. download the OS, flash it to an SD card
  2. connect up the power to the device
  3. Press and hold for 1 second the POWER push button.
  4. Wait while the contents of the SD card is written to the internal eMMC, the device will then shutdown itself down. probably take 5 - 10 minutes.
  5. You then must remove the SD card
    6 Remove and re-connect power to the board.
3

If you have an hdmi screen you could connect that up and flash a .dev variant of the OS to the tx1 and it will show logs on the screen so that will help us debug things further.

4

Additionally there is no need to have jetpack, it is not used for flashing the OS, everything needed is contained in the image you download and flash to the SD card.

6

Hi, shaunmulligan

Thank you for your reply.
Basically what i did :

  1. Download balena os for Jetson TX1 from
    https://files.balena-cloud.com/images/jetson-tx1/2.29.2%2Brev2.dev/image/balena.img.zip
  2. balena os configure balena.img --app jetson-app
    to configure the wireless SSID and password
  3. flash the image into SD card
  4. connect up the power to jetson-tx1 board
  5. power up push button

After that there nothing coming up on my monitor screen [I am using HDMI].
By the way, my jetson-tx1 board is already flashed with linux tegra os from Jet Pack before [ it runs on linux tegra os from jetpack]

Am I right to say that we need to replace jetpack version of linux in board’s eMMC with balena os?

7

Can you tell me what version of linux for tegra OS you are running on the device? I remember that there might be some issue with flashing from older tegra OS versions.

9

One of my colleagues mentioned that you will need to first update your TX1 to L4T 28.1 https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/linux-tegra-r281 , this will make sure the bootloader on the device will then be able to load balenaOS correctly. So step 1. flash the above ^^ onto the device using the standard Nvidia tooling and then follow the steps I highlighted above.

11

Thanks a lot, bros!
So, here is my step by step instructions:

  1. You will need JetPack to Flash L4T 28.1 to the board.
    Download load it here:
    https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/dlc/jetpack-l4t-3_1

For a list of jetpack:

  1. JetPack need Host Computer and Target Board [Jetson-TX1].
    Host OS should be Ubuntu 16.04…Other version won’t work.

  2. Follow the instruction to install JetPack. You will need to flash the l4t 28.1 to your board
    It will take sometimes to flash it l4t 28.1

  3. Restart the board, load version l4t 28.1

  4. Now you may proceed to replace l4t 28.1 with balena os:
    a. download the OS, flash it to an SD card
    b. connect up the power to the device
    c. Press and hold for 1 second the POWER push button.
    d. Wait while the contents of the SD card is written to the internal eMMC, the device will then shutdown itself down. probably take 5 - 10 minutes.
    e. You then must remove the SD card [IMPORTANT]
    f Remove and re-connect power to the board.