Flashing tool has no option to specify download directory

I ONLY have 8GB of /tmp space and flashing fails due to “no space left on device”.

While the Uno-Q flashing page states we need more than 1GB of space for download( actually 2.2GB ) it doesn’t state that it also needs over 8GB of space for extracting the archive.

8.5G flasher-updater-1598470955/arduino-unoq-debian-image-20251024-412
2.2G flasher-updater-1598470955/update.tar.zst

Probably should add better documentation on those size requirements and personally I’d rather see the stuff created in the current directory then cleaned up on exit.

My solution was to to run the flash tool like this:

mkdir ./tmp && TMPDIR=./tmp && arduino-flasher-cli flash latest

Maybe a better solution is a command line option to arduino-flasher-cli which allows specifying the download directory. ex arduino-flasher-cli flash latest ./tmp

The flashing does fail once the software in downloaded and extracted with

qdl: unable to open device

I see no issue with qcserial but I removed that module and I also stopped ModemManager and still “qdl: unable to open device” and this is using flasher v0.3.0 for Linux.

Also, the flashing instructions do not tell the user to remove the jump before cycling power after flashing is complete. It is in the Troubleshooting section but should be in the actual instructions.

Thanks for the feedback.

We recently release the 0.4.0 of the arduino-flasher-cli Release v0.4.0 · arduino/arduino-flasher-cli · GitHub that adds the --temp-dir directory during the flash to specify the path to the directory in which the image will be downloaded and extracted:

Example:

arduino-flasher-cli flash latest --temp-dir /path/to/custom/tempDir

Yup, I saw the beta a week ago, tried it and validated it worked. Probably should still make sure the owners of the Uno-Q know that they’ll need at least 10 gigaBytes of free storage to download the compressed image and extract it.

My preference with working with the DonkeyCar project(http://docs.donkeycar.com ) had always been to extract to a pipe instead of caching but while Mac and Linux have these capabilities, Windows is probably lacking so extracting everything to disk and then deleting is the easy method.

I do appreciate that now I can run from a locally persistent directory instead of having to extract constantly as I’ve debugged the flashing system and you’re naming your directories based on the version. NVidia really was terrible at this with their Jetson OS images. ie:

./arduino-flasher-cli flash flasher-updater-1598470955/arduino-unoq-debian-image-20251024-412/

because,

/Projects/Arduino/Uno-Q/ArduinoAppLab_0.2.0_Linux_x86-64$ du -h flasher-updater-1598470955/arduino-unoq-debian-image-20251024-412/*
489M flasher-updater-1598470955/arduino-unoq-debian-image-20251024-412/disk-sdcard.img.esp
699M flasher-updater-1598470955/arduino-unoq-debian-image-20251024-412/disk-sdcard.img.home
7.3G flasher-updater-1598470955/arduino-unoq-debian-image-20251024-412/disk-sdcard.img.root
9.1M flasher-updater-1598470955/arduino-unoq-debian-image-20251024-412/flash

Thanks for the suggestion. This is already done, starting from version 0.4.0: