flash

Command line script to flash SD card images for the Raspberry Pi.

This script can

• download a compressed SD card from the internet or from S3
• use a local SD card image, either compressed or uncompressed
• wait until a SD card is plugged in
• search for a SD card plugged into your Computer
• show progress bar while flashing (if pv is installed)
• copy an optional occidentalis.txt file into the boot partition of the SD image
• copy an optional config.txt file into the boot partition of the SD image
• optional set the hostname of this SD image
• optional set the WiFi settings as well
• play a little sound after flashing
• unplugs the SD card

At the moment only Mac OS X and Linux is supported.

Installation

Download the appropriate version for Linux or Mac with this command

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hypriot/flash/master/$(uname -s)/flash
chmod +x flash
sudo mv flash /usr/local/bin/flash

Install Dependencies

The flash script needs optional tools

• curl - if you want to flash directly with an HTTP URL
• aws - if you want to flash directly from an AWS S3 bucket
• pv - to see a progress bar while flashing with the dd command

Mac

brew install pv
brew install awscli

Linux

sudo apt-get install -y pv curl python-pip
sudo pip install awscli

Usage

$ flash --help
usage: flash [options] name-of-rpi.img

Flash a local or remote Raspberry Pi SD card image.

OPTIONS:
   --help|-h      Show this message
   --bootconf|-C  Copy this config file to /boot/config.txt
   --config|-c    Copy this config file to /boot/occidentalis.txt
   --hostname|-n  Set hostname for this SD image
   --ssid|-s      Set WiFi SSID for this SD image
   --password|-p  Set WiFI password for this SD image

How it looks like

This is a complete download and flash cycle with all its steps.

$ flash http://downloads.hypriot.com/hypriot-rpi-20151004-132414.img.zip
Downloading http://downloads.hypriot.com/hypriot-rpi-20151004-132414.img.zip ...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  346M  100  346M    0     0  5643k      0  0:01:02  0:01:02 --:--:-- 5366k
Uncompressing /tmp/image.img.zip ...
Archive:  /tmp/image.img.zip
  inflating: /tmp/hypriot-rpi-20151004-132414.img
Use /tmp/hypriot-rpi-20151004-132414.img
No SD card found. Please insert SD card, I'll wait for it...
Filesystem    512-blocks      Used Available Capacity   iused    ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1     974700800 863201064 110987736    89% 107964131 13873467   89%   /
devfs                669       669         0   100%      1159        0  100%   /dev
map -hosts             0         0         0   100%         0        0  100%   /net
map auto_home          0         0         0   100%         0        0  100%   /home
/dev/disk2s1      114576     29456     85120    26%       512        0  100%   /Volumes/boot

Is /dev/disk2s1 correct? y
Unmounting disk2 ...
Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful
Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful
Flashing /tmp/hypriot-rpi-20151004-132414.img to disk2 ...
Password:
 976MiB 0:01:12 [13.4MiB/s] [=============================================>] 100%
0+15625 records in
0+15625 records out
1024000000 bytes transferred in 72.779589 secs (14069879 bytes/sec)
Unmounting and ejecting disk2 ...
Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful
Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful
Disk /dev/disk2 ejected
🍺  Finished.

occidentalis.txt

The option --config could be used to copy a occidentalis.txt into the SD image before it is unplugged.

Many kudos to Adafruit's occi package that handles updating hostname and WiFi settings while booting the Raspberry Pi.

The config file occidentalis.txt should look like

# hostname for your Hypriot Raspberry Pi:
hostname=hypriot-pi

# basic wireless networking options:
wifi_ssid=SSID
wifi_password=12345

config.txt

The option --bootconf can be used to copy a config.txt into the SD image before it is unplugged.

With this option it is possible to change some memory, camera, video settings etc. See the config.txt documentation at raspberrypi.org for more details.

The boot config file config.txt has name/value pairs such as:

max_usb_current=1
hdmi_force_hotplug=1

Use cases

Flash a compressed SD image from the internet

flash http://downloads.hypriot.com/hypriot-rpi-20151004-132414.img.zip

Flash a compressed SD image from S3 bucket

flash s3://bucket/path/to/hypriot-rpi-20150611-195657.img.zip

Flash with a given hostname

This works only for SD card images that already have occi installed.

flash --hostname mypi hypriot.img

Then unplug the SD card from your computer, plug it into your Pi and boot your Pi. After a while the Pi can be found via Bonjour/avahi and you can log in with

ssh pi@mypi.local