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Turning your ARM device into AngelBox

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Ondřej Perutka edited this page May 5, 2026 · 22 revisions

Are you interested in our AngelBox? You can have one for free! We offer you a complete SD card image for Raspberry Pi 2/3/4 or you can also use our APT repository to install Arrow Client into an existing Debian based ARM system.

Cloning SD card image

Before you continue, you will need the following:

  • 4 GB micro SD card (or bigger),
  • Raspberry Pi Imager,
  • our AngelBox image.

Raspberry Pi Imager is a multi-platform tool for cloning Raspberry Pi SD card images. You can download it from raspberrypi.com. The AngelBox image can be downloaded from here. All Raspberry Pi images are named angel-box-rpi-*.img.zip. To clone the SD card image, follow these simple steps:

  1. Open Raspberry Pi Imager.
  2. Click on the "Choose OS" button and select the "Use custom" option.
  3. Select the AngelBox image.
  4. Plug in your SD card.
  5. Click on the "Choose Storage" button and select the SD card.
  6. Click on the "Next" button.
  7. Configure default username and password and enable SSH.
  8. Wait until the flashing is done.
  9. Unplug the SD card.

Post installation setup

  1. Plug the SD card into your device.

  2. Connect the device to your local network using an Ethernet cable.

  3. Power on the device.

  4. Connect your workstation to the same local network.

  5. Find IP address of your device in the list of DHCP clients of your router OR change IP address of your workstation to 192.168.123.1 and mask to 255.255.255.0.

  6. Connect to the device using SSH (address: 192.168.123.123 or the address assigned by DHCP).

    1. In Windows, you can use PuTTY.
    2. In OS X or Linux, open terminal and enter ssh pi@IP_ADDRESS.

  7. Get MAC address of your device and write it down somewhere:

    cat /sys/class/net/eth0/address

Installation from our APT repository

For using the deb packages from our repository, you will need a running Debian Stretch/Buster/Bullseye/Bookworm/Trixie based distribution on an ARM device, e.g. Raspberry Pi OS Trixie on Raspberry Pi. Please note that right now we support only 32-bit ARM.

Log in to your device (either directly or using SSH) and enter the following commands into the terminal:

curl -fsSL http://apt.angelcam.com/gpg/angelcam.asc \
    | sudo sh -c 'gpg --dearmor > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/angelcam-archive-stable.gpg'

# For Debian Stretch/Buster/Bullseye:
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.angelcam.com/raspbian-stretch stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/arrow.list'

# For Debian Bookworm:
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.angelcam.com/rpios-bookworm stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/arrow.list'

# For Debian Trixie:
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.angelcam.com/rpios-trixie stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/arrow.list'

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install arrow-box

The arrow-box service gets started automatically after installation of the package. If you need to start/stop it manually, you can use standard systemd commands:

sudo systemctl start arrow-box.service
sudo systemctl stop arrow-box.service

All logs go into syslog. If you need to modify the arrow-client startup parameters, you can modify them in the /etc/default/arrow-box file. To list all available parameters, run the following command:

/usr/local/arrow-box/arrow-client

Optionally you can also install the arrow-box-utils package. The package contains a cron job that will keep your client up to date, there is also a service that can use one of the RPi LEDs as an Arrow Client connection status indicator and, finally, there is a service that can transform your AngelBox into a cloud speaker. To install the additional package, enter the following command:

sudo apt-get install arrow-box-utils

To enable the connection status indicator:

sudo systemctl enable arrow-box-led.service
sudo systemctl start arrow-box-led.service

To enable the cloud speaker service:

sudo systemctl enable arrow-box-api.service
sudo systemctl start arrow-box-api.service

Connecting to Angelcam

Congratulations! Your AngelBox is ready to roll! Now, the only thing you will need to connect to Angelcam is an IP camera with support of H.264 over RTSP or MJPEG. Connect the camera to the same local network as your AngelBox, go to my.angelcam.com/connect/diy-angelbox and enter the MAC address of your AngelBox.

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