Using a Raspberry Pi architecture with Xangle only means that you have to flash microSD cards. You NEVER have to access the pis directly. The flashing steps doesn't require any additional software, and it is pretty straightforward. Once your sd card is flashed, you simply insert it in the Pi and you forget about it. For large arrays, check out also the Batch Cloner.
- * PRE-FLASHED CARDS **
Pre flashed cards (ready to use!) are now available from our store. Simply follow this link to get packs of 6 MicroSD cards: https://shop.ericpare.com/collections/xangle
By doing this, you cut corners and you're ready to roll with zero setup time on the Raspberry Pis. Once you receive our cards, you simply insert them in your Raspberry Pis and you're good to go (no operation on the Pis at all - we automated everything). Please note that if we do major updates, you might have to clone a new image using the procedure below
Steps to clone a micro-sd card
- Run Xangle Camera Server in Administrator mode (right click on the app shortcut, run as administrator)
- Open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8091/pi-cloner
- Insert a MicroSD card in a card reader on your computer. Make sure you don't have any other cards or usb-sticks connected to the computer to avoid any bad surprises. Use cards with capacity of at least 16gb
- Download the up-to-date image (click on the "download image" button). You only need to do this once.
- Once the Image is downloaded, click on "Write to SD card
- Make yourself a coffee while the card is being flashed
- Put the microSd card in the Pi, and you're good to go.
Troubleshooting
1- Partition problems
If the pi-cloner is reporting errors with a SD card that has previously been cloned for Xangle (or any other raspberry pi OS), you should erase all the partitions present on the cards and reformat it. Here is the procedure:
- Open the windows disk management tool (windows key + x -> disk management)
- Find the disk associated with your sd card, It should be a disk with 3 partitions (1 FAT 32 ~200Mb called "boot", 1 Unknown ~ 3.3 Gb, and 1 unallocated).
- Right-click on each primary partition and choose "Delete volume"
- Once the whole card is just a single "unallocated" partition, right click on it and choose "format", proceed with all the default options.
2- Xangle doesn't recognize your SD Card drive
In the rare case where your drive wouldn't show up in the drive list at the top, you can use this workaround to manually flash the cards
- Download the Pi image following the steps at the beginning of this article
- Download and install win32 disk imager
- Once installed, run win32 disk image as administrator:
- Connect a clean SD card to your computer (using a card reader)
- Click the blue folder button, and find the .img on your computer (usually located in c:\users\your-user-name\xanglecs\pi-images). Then, under device, choose the letter corresponding to the SD card you want to flash (the one you just inserted).
- Now click on "Write" and wait for the process to be over. (You should go back to #4 for each new SD you want to clone...)