Robots · Add a robot

A robot from a blank microSD card

No screen, no keyboard, nothing to type on the robot. This page makes the card's setup files: on its first boot your Raspberry Pi joins your Wi-Fi, turns on SSH, installs OpenVibe and adds itself to your robots.

What you need

  1. Describe the robot and your Wi-Fi

  2. Write Raspberry Pi OS to the card

    1. Install Raspberry Pi Imager on your computer (version 2.0 or newer) and put the card in.
    2. Device: your Pi (e.g. Raspberry Pi 4). Operating system: Raspberry Pi OS (other) → Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit). Storage: your microSD card.
    3. When Imager offers to customise the OS, skip it (choose No): your two files do that.
    4. Write, and wait until Imager says it is done and verified.

  3. Add your two files to the card

    1. Take the card out of the computer and put it back in. A drive called bootfs opens.
    2. Copy user-data and network-config there, replacing the files with the same names.
    3. The names must be exactly user-data and network-config, with no .txt (on Windows, turn on File name extensions to check).
    4. Eject the card.

  4. Switch the robot on

    Put the card in the robot's Pi and switch it on. The first start takes 3 to 10 minutes: it sets itself up, restarts once, joins your Wi-Fi and installs OpenVibe and the robot's driver.

    Sign in and make your card files: this shows your robot arriving.

If it does not arrive