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Image setup

Download initial image

The easiest way to try out the full Pantahub experience is to install an initial, personalized Pantavisor-enabled image. This contains a set of Linux based containers that provide basic network connectivity and discovery services and will automatically link the Raspberry Pi device to your Pantahub account for remote management.

Visit your personalized pantavisor image page and select your Raspberry Pi device. We recommend you to select the "stable" release channel.

Flash initial image

You can install this image with your preferred tool. Specific instructions for your operating system can be found on the Raspberry Pi installation instructions for Linux, for Mac OS as well as for Windows.

Raspberry Pi Imager

For most users, we recommend to use the Raspberry Pi Imager to flash our Pantavisor Image onto the micro SD card. Alternatively, check out the command line instructions to flash your device without additional software requirements.

  1. Download the Raspberry Pi Imager.
  2. Choose the initial image downloaded previously.
  3. Select your micro SD card and click write.

Linux commands

For quick Linux instructions you can use the dd tool following these steps (remember to substitute /dev/sdX for the device node corresponding to your SD card, or else you will overwrite the wrong device!):

umount /dev/sdX*
gunzip -c  arm-rpi3.img.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=32M
sync

Mac OS commands

For Mac Os, the procedure is similar. First step would be to manually extract the rpi3_initial_stable.img.xz file. Then you could find the SD card device name by opening a terminal and running the following command:

df -h

You can see that on the bottom a 15 GB disk /dev/disk3 is mounted on /Volimes/BOOT.

After that, you can unmount it and flash it with the dd tool (remember to substitute /Volumes/BOOT and /dev/disk3 for the device node corresponding to your SD card):

diskutil umount /Volumes/BOOT


sudo dd if=arm-rpi3.img of=/dev/disk3 bs=32m
sync

You can verify the image contents by opening the SD card partition named "boot":

Notes: What does this image contain?

Any Pantavisor device must have a BSP (Linux Kernel, Pantavisor binary and Linux drivers) and one to many containers.

In the case of our RPi3 and RPi4 base images, Pantavisor is running these three Linux containers:

  • awconnect: automatically brings up basic cabled networking. If this fails, it will create a hotspot with SSID "Wifi Connect" that will let you to manually configure your device for WiFi connection.
  • pv-avahi: it uses DNS multicast for device discoverability.
  • pvr-sdk: contains tools to help your development and debugging.

The example image provided is running a few more things next to Pantavisor. For example, a ssh server for inspecting each one of the containers plus the root mount namespace to get more familiar with the system internals, tty console support for boot up debugging...

The images in this get started guide have been taken from our latest stable version. Go here to see how to build your own images.