Cloning Your Robot Brain-on-a-Stick Flash Drive

Cloning Your Robot Brain-on-a-Stick Flash Drive

Most operating systems have many available tools for cloning a USB drive. ImageUSB is a good free Windows 10 utility. On macOS you can use the built-in Unix-based utilities (a little messy) or the Etcher software you downloaded to create the Brain-on-a-Stick (very easy). Chromebooks, predictably, are difficult about all of this (sighs).

Cloning a USB Flash Drive in macOS Using Etcher

  1. Make sure you have a functional Xubuntu “Brain-on-a-Stick” flash drive and a fresh USB flash drive that you’d like to make into a clone.
  2. Plug in both flash drives
  3. Launch Etcher
  4. Click “Clone drive” (in the left side if the Etcher window, below the two “Flash” buttons)
  5. Click “Select target” and select your destination USB flash drive.
  6. Click “Flash!” Once the process is complete, there may be a dialogue reading “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.” Click “Eject” and everything will be fine.
  7. Remove your USB flash drive and you’re ready to go!

Cloning a USB Flash Drive Using a Chromebook

This is trickier. As of this writing, it doesn’t seem that cloning USB drives is supported (or encouraged) on Chromebooks. However, you can clone the Xubuntu OS as it is running on your Chromebook.

  1. Boot up your Chromebook in Xubuntu using your “Brain-on-a-Stick” flash drive
  2. Open up the web browser, go to https://www.balena.io/etcher/ and download Etcher
  3. In the Downloads folder, right click on the Zipfolder, and drag the file ending in “.AppImage” out into the Downloads folder
  4. Launch the Terminal Emulator. Type: cd Downloads/
  5. Run the command ./balena* to launch Etcher (a new Etcher window should open).
  6. Plug in the fresh USB flash drive you wish to clone this OS onto.
  7. Click “Clone drive” (in the left side if the Etcher window, below the two “Flash” buttons)
  8. Select the drive that is labeled something like “Xubuntu 20…..”
  9. Click “Select target” and select your destination USB flash drive.
  10.  Click “Flash!”
  11. After process finishes, you should have a copy of your bootable USB. You may see a dialogue reading something like “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.” Click “Eject” and everything will be fine.