Installing a Raspberry Pi

You can install a project on several Raspberry Pis.

Flashing the SD card

First, you will flash an SD card, to install the Rapsberry Pi OS on an SD card.

Run Raspberry Pi Imager, also called rpi-imager.

You can select your Raspberry Pi device.

Then select the operating system. We support the current Raspberry Pi OS (Bookworm) Lite 64-bit.

You can select the 'Lite' version to use less resources on a headless Raspberry. It is located in Raspberry Pi OS (Other).

Insert an SD card, and select it.

Click Next.

INFO

By default, the imager will automatically eject the SD Card when the installation terminates.This behavior can be changed in the Option tab of the imager settings.

TIP

Any imager customisation is over-ridden by the project customization. For consistency, you should avoid the imager customization.

Validate to continue.

Wait until the end of the process.

Do not remove the SD card, yet. Before, you will need to apply dotpi to it. You should see a volume called bootfs mounted in your machine.

If the imager automatically ejected the SD Card after flashing, let's just re-plug the SC Card to apply the dotpi configuration.

Finalizing the SD card

This step will copy the dotpi installer with your project customizations to the SD card.

In directory of the projects, select one to install.

cd ~/Documents/dotpi-projects/
dotpi-tools --install-rpi

Then, follow the wizard.

Hit enter to accept a default option, or type a new value and validate with enter.

Depending on your system, you may need to enter a password to access the SD card.

INFO

If there is an error related to the SD card, unplug it and plug it back to your machine. Then, start again the installation.

cd ~/Documents/dotpi-projects/
dotpi-tools --install-rpi

The installation will continue.

At the end, you need to eject the SD card from your machine. Insert it in a Raspberry Pi and turn it on.

After the network is enabled on the Raspberry Pi (wired or wifi), you can monitor the distant installation of the Raspberry Pi.

After a while the system of the Raspberry Pi is prepared.

2024-11-20 15:17:51 INFO: System prepared.

The system reboots, this closes the connection.

2024-11-20 15:17:51 INFO: Rebooting...
Connection to dotpi-dev-123.local closed by remote host.

After the reboot, the Raspberry Pi is ready. It will connect to the wifi, and to the dotpi-manager.