Flashing Guide

Bundles ship pre-flashed with the ARK Jetson image and ARK-OS. Follow this guide to update to a newer release or to flash a Jetson for the first time.

The image is built from the ark_jetson_kernel repository, which adds the carrier's device tree to NVIDIA's JetPack. One image covers every Orin Nano/NX module variant.

A stock NVIDIA JetPack image will not enable all carrier hardware — use the ARK image, or build from source with the ARK device tree.

Enter Recovery Mode

Connect the USB-C port to your host PC, then power on the Jetson while holding the Force Recovery button.

Flash a Prebuilt Release (recommended)

On a Debian/Ubuntu host, download the flasher script and flash the latest PAB V3 release to the NVMe SSD:

curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ARK-Electronics/ark_jetson_kernel/main/packaging/flash_from_package.sh
chmod +x flash_from_package.sh
./flash_from_package.sh pab-v3

The script downloads the release package from the releases page (tags starting with pab-v3-), waits for the Jetson in recovery mode, and flashes the bootloader and root filesystem. No build tools needed. Pass a specific tag instead of pab-v3 to flash a specific version.

pab-v3 images are for this product only. The original ARK Jetson PAB Carrier — including its hardware revision 3 (PAB Rev 3) — uses pab images.

Build From Source

To customize the kernel, device tree, or preinstalled software, build and flash from source — see the ark_jetson_kernel README:

./setup.sh            # one-time download of BSP + rootfs + sources
./build.sh PAB_V3     # build and provision the image (installs ARK-OS)
./flash.sh PAB_V3     # flash to NVMe (--sdcard and --usb also available)

You can bake a WiFi profile into the image before flashing with ./scripts/add_wifi_network.sh PAB_V3 <ssid> <password>.