NixOS on the Raspberry PI

A NixOS Flake providing bare bones (but ready to go!) configurations for Raspberry Pi devices.

Build sd-card images with your own configuration
Easily pull in fixes for various Raspberry Pi hardware variations and HATs

Supported Hardware

See the table below for a list of supported and unsupported hardware

Board	Arch	Supported
Raspberry Pi 4	aarch64	Yes
Raspberry Pi 3	aarch64	Yes
Raspberry Pi Zero W 2	aarch64	Yes
Raspberry Pi 2	armv7	No
Raspberry Pi 1	armv6	No
Raspberry Pi Zero W	armv6	No

As you can tell only aarch64 is supported, this is because Nix provides public caches for this architecture.

In theory it should be possible to build for non-aarch64 hardware, but there are no publicly available caches and the author hasn't yet tried to build them (though I do have several RPI 1s and RPI0W1s lying around...).

Workaround and other Shenanigans

This repo provides workarounds for the following issues:

Prerequisites

You are already running NixOS on your build machine

If your build-machine isn't aarch64-linux, then you will need to add the following to your build machine's NixOS configuration to emulate aarch64 (arm64) so you can cross-build.

{
  boot.binfmt.emulatedSystems = [ "aarch64-linux" ];
}

Example Usage

Using this flake you can create Raspberry PI SD card images with your own configuration.

Example flake.nix (click me)

# flake.nix
{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
    nixos-raspberrypi.url = "github:ramblurr/nixos-raspberrypi";
  };
  outputs = {
    self,
    nixpkgs,
    nixos-raspberrypi,
  }: {
    images = {
      rpi4 =
        (nixos-raspberrypi.nixosConfigurations.rpi4.extendModules {
          modules = [
            nixos-raspberrypi.nixosModules.sd-image-rpi4
            ./configuration.nix # <--- put your configuration here, see below for an example
          ];
        })
        .config
        .system
        .build
        .sdImage;
    };
  };
}

Example configuration.nix (click me)

# configuration.nix
{ pkgs, config, lib, ... }:
{
  system.stateVersion = "23.11";
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [ vim git ];
  services.openssh.enable = true;
  networking.hostName = "pi";
  users = {
    users.YOUR_USERNAME = {
      password = "YOUR_PASSWORD";
      isNormalUser = true;
      extraGroups = [ "wheel" ];
    };
  };
  networking = {
    interfaces."wlan0".useDHCP = true;
    wireless = {
      interfaces = [ "wlan0" ];
      enable = true;
      networks = {
        "YOUR_WIFI_SSID".psk = "YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD";
      };
    };
  };
}

Then run nix build .#images.rpi4. After a while your sd-image will appear in result/sd-image/nixos-sd-image*.img

Some things to keep in mind for your config:

Don't forget to add a system.stateVersion do your configuration.
If you have a wifi only pi (e.g., Raspberry Pi Zero W 2), don't forget to configure the wireless network.

List of Options

Module	Purpose
`raspberry-pi.hardware.hifiberry-dacplusadc.enable = true;`	Enable support for the Hifiberry DAC+ ADC
`raspberry-pi.hardware.respeaker-2mic.enable = true;`	Enable support for the Seeed Respeaker 2 Mic card
`raspberry-pi.hardware.respeaker-4mic.enable = true;`	Enable support for the Seeed Respeaker 4 Mic card
`raspberry-pi.hardware.respeaker-8mic.enable = true;`	Enable support for the Seeed Respeaker 8 Mic card