README.md

Building custom DonkeyCar Image

Install packer

• Follow the procedure at : https://www.packer.io/downloads
• Check that you have the command packer in a terminal

For developers :

• install HCL support extension : https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=wholroyd.HCL

Building the image

Packer ARM plugin need root privileges to run. To build the images use the following commands :

sudo packer init .
sudo packer build -on-error=abort donkeycar.pkr.hcl # Using on-error abort to keep the image if error occured

Then grab some ☕️☕️☕️

Testing the image on a raspberry pi

Simply dd the image present in output-raspbian/image onto your raspberry pi :

$ lsblk # Find your raspbery pi device name
...
sde      8:64   1  29,1G  0 disk 
├─sde1   8:65   1   256M  0 part /media/benjamin/boot
└─sde2   8:66   1  28,9G  0 part /media/benjamin/rootfs
# For me it's /dev/sde, 30 GB sd card
$ export DEVICE_NAME=/dev/sde # Adapt this line
$ sudo dd if=output-raspbian/image bs=4M of=$DEVICE_NAME status=progress && sync

Mounting an image

To mount an image and read / write to it without having to write to it a physical drive first, you can use losetup:

To add the device

# losetup -Pf <image>

The image's 'drives' will then be of the form /dev/loopX (/dev/loopXpY for partitions). (ex)

$ lsblk
NAME         MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0          7:0    0   7.6G  0 loop 
├─loop0p1    259:13   0   256M  0 part
└─loop0p2    259:14   0   7.4G  0 part 

You can then mount these to any path on the computer.

To remove the device, first make sure to unmount the partitions

# umount /dev/loopXp0
# umount /dev/loopXp1
...

Then detach it using losetup

# losetup -d /dev/loopX

Current issue

We didn't manage to use packer Ansible-remote (due to this issue packer-builder-arm#169, so we need to install ansible on the raspberry pi it self.