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Enzo Ghisoni edited this page Jan 30, 2026 · 8 revisions

🐣 I'm a Complete Beginner

Welcome to the Complete Beginner tutorial for RustyRover!
This page takes you from having a fresh Raspberry Pi 4 to a working development environment with Ubuntu 24 and Pixi installed so you’ll be ready to build and run the RustyRover project.

If you’ve never used ROS 2 before, no worries, we’ll also point you to the official ROS 2 tutorials for your first steps.

🧠 What You’ll Learn

By the end of this page you will have:

  1. Ubuntu 24 onto a Raspberry Pi 4 SD card
  2. Booted your Pi and connected to Wi-Fi or Ethernet
  3. Installed Pixi: the package/workspace manager we use for RustyRover
  4. Learned where to find beginner ROS 2 tutorials

📦 Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

  • A Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB or 8 GB recommended)
  • A micro-SD card (16 GB +)
  • A computer to flash the micro-SD card
  • Internet connection (Wi-Fi or Ethernet)
  • A USB-C power supply for the Pi

If you want to run the full robot (not just simulation), make sure your hardware is assembled as per the RustyRover Hardware page.

🪶 Step 1: Flash Ubuntu 24 to Your SD Card

We recommend using the Raspberry Pi Imager tool to prepare your SD card.

📥 Install Raspberry Pi Imager

  1. Download it from the official Raspberry Pi website:

  2. Install and open the Imager on your laptop or desktop.

🗂️ Choose the Device

  1. Click CHOOSE Device
  2. Select Raspberry Pi 4

🗂️ Choose the OS

  1. Click CHOOSE OS
  2. Select to Other general-purpose OS
  3. Scroll to Ubuntu
  4. Select Ubuntu Server 24.04 (64-bit)

💽 Choose the SD Card

  1. Click CHOOSE STORAGE
  2. Select your micro-SD card from the list
    ⚠️Make sure it’s the correct drive — this will erase the card!

⚙️ Set Advanced Options

In the imager, open Advanced options (gear icon) and:

  • Set your Wi-Fi SSID + Password
  • Set your local username
  • Enable SSH
  • Set your locale/timezone

You will need to complete this setup to be able to connect in ssh after the reboot.

🚀 Flash the Card

Click WRITE and wait.
Once complete, eject the SD card safely.

🪟 Step 2: Boot Your Raspberry Pi

  1. Insert the SD card into your Raspberry Pi
  2. Power on

Your Pi will boot Ubuntu 24.04!

☁️ Step 3: Update Your System

Open a terminal on the Pi and run:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y

What next?

Now that you have your raspberry pi configured, if you don't already know the basics of ROS 2, you should follow the tutorials from the documentation to get the requirements to understand the RustyRover project. https://docs.ros.org/en/kilted/Tutorials.html

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