Raspberry Pi image

A published image is Raspberry Pi OS Lite 64-bit with Meshloom already installed. First boot does not need the internet.

Which Pi

Your board	How to install
Pi 3B / 3B+ / 3A+, Compute Module 3, Zero 2 W, Pi 4, Pi 5	This image. It is the fastest route and nothing else is needed.
Pi 2, or any Pi already running the 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS	The one-liner. It detects the architecture and installs the armhf package.
Pi 1, Compute Module 1, original Zero and Zero W	Not supported. These are ARMv6 and no package is built for them.

Prefer the 64-bit image on a board that can run it: it is faster, and the 32-bit package is built under emulation. A Pi 2 only ever runs 32-bit, so the one-liner is its route.

The 32-bit package is recent, published in 4.12.2. Earlier versions could not install on a 32-bit system at all.

What to expect on a Pi 2 or Pi 3

Nobody has published measurements for these boards, so treat what follows as what is known rather than as a promise.

Both have 1 GB of memory, and most of what looks expensive in Meshloom is not on the Pi: the map, the 3-D view and the packet feed are drawn by whatever browser you open the interface in. What the Pi runs is the server, the radio link and an SQLite database.

The likelier limit is the SD card. The database is written to on every message and every observed packet, and a cheap card is slow at exactly that and wears out doing it. If you plan to leave a node running for months, a good card, or a USB SSD, matters more than the board.

A Pi 2 is the slowest of the supported boards and the interface will feel it when the history grows. If you try one, tell us where it stops being comfortable: that is a number nobody has yet.

Flash

1. Download meshloom-rpi-lite-arm64.img.xz and meshloom.rpi-imager-manifest from the GitHub release. The Release workflow attaches them after the arm64 .deb is built (they can land a bit later than the packages).
2. Open Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.6 or newer. Older 1.9.x builds do not write Trixie cloud-init customisation, so hostname, Wi-Fi, and SSH are ignored.
3. Open the manifest (double-click it, or rpi-imager --repo path/to/meshloom.rpi-imager-manifest). That file sets init_format: cloudinit-rpi. Do not pick Use custom on the .img.xz alone — Imager 2.x then assumes no customisation and skips Wi-Fi, user, and SSH.
4. Set hostname, user, SSH key, and Wi-Fi there. Do not expect those secrets to be inside the download.
5. Write the card, boot the Pi.

On first boot, Ethernet and Wi-Fi are optional: the machine starts even if no cable or SSID is ready.

Open Meshloom

If a screen is plugged in, the console shows:

http://meshloom.local:8000
http://<lan-ip>:8000

Without a screen, use the .local name from another device on the same network, or the address your router gave the Pi. Then choose the radio under Settings → Radio.

Without any network, open http://127.0.0.1:8000 on the Pi itself. Messaging and the radio work offline. Maps, Community, Web Push, and in-app updates wait until the machine can reach the internet.

Update

When the image (or a Linux package install) can apply updates, Settings → Updates offers Install now and an optional automatic update. That path upgrades Meshloom only, from the signed Meshloom repository, not the whole operating system. Images from 4.18 on watch for update requests out of the box; on an older image, one sudo apt update && sudo apt install meshloom turns that on.

If Settings → Updates says you must update Meshloom manually, use the recipe it shows, or re-run the Linux installer so it can restore the missing helper:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://get.meshloom.app)"

Home Assistant add-ons update in Home Assistant, not from this button.

MESHLOOM_COMMUNITY is not set on the image. A new database joins Community by default, same as every other install.