We’ve got a number of RPI5s with attached nvme drives, and I was looking for easy ways to flash them. I have had success using an inexpensive m.2 to usb adapter.
However, I’ve also been working with the Orins, and the flasher image + config.json method to set the installaton target is very helpful there.
I tried setting the install target in config.json on the RPI5 images, but it doesn’t seem to work, and just runs off of the usb drive or sdcard. And if I try to download a flasher image explicitly, using balena os download, I get a message that this type of image isn’t available for this device.
Are there plans to support this feature? It would be quite helpful.
Thanks!
Hi, there are no concrete plans to support installer media for raspberry pi device types at this time, but we’ve noted your request. I suggest moving your request to the feature request section so that others can vote for it if they would like it and share usecases as well.
I’m not sure if it is applicable to your use case, but I was exploring using a bootable RaspberryPi OS USB stick that flashes the image to the device at boot. As long as there’s no image already on the NVMe, the Pi will boot off USB and then you can have a systemd unit that looks for the NVMe drive and writes the image to it using dd. You can have the script control the device’s status light to indicate that the flash completed successfully. This is how we plan on provisioning a bunch of devices as they are assembled.
-mike