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 Micro USB 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 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

The script downloads the release package from the releases page (tags starting with pab-), 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 to flash a specific version.

Hardware revision 3 of this carrier (PAB Rev 3) still uses the pab image. pab-v3 releases are for the ARK Jetson PAB Carrier V3, a different product.

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      # build and provision the image (installs ARK-OS)
./flash.sh PAB      # 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 <ssid> <password>.