Prepare an SD card with an image

After you've downloaded a platform-specific reference image for the Sensor Framework for QNX SDP, you must transfer it to your target board.

To do so, you must first copy the image onto an SD card. The steps you use depend on your host OS and presume that you have downloaded and extracted the reference image to a directory on your host system.

Warning: Ensure that you put the image on a partition on your SD card. If accidentally put the image on a partition on your host, you could corrupt and render your host system inoperable.

We recommend that you use an SD card that's at least 8GB in size.

Ensure that you use cards that are at least UHS-I in speed for better read/write performance. These cards can be identified by a “U” with a number “1” inside it, as shown below:

Figure 1. The UHS-I identifier

When you've finished transferring the reference image to your SD card, follow the steps in “Configure the hardware and boot the reference image” to boot the board.

Transferring an image using Linux

From the directory you extracted the ZIP file to, run the following command in a terminal to copy a reference image to removable storage:

Note: Some variants of Linux don't require that you use sudo.

sudo dd if=imx8qm-mek-sd.img of=/dev/sdX

This command causes the dd utility to write data to the SD card. It assumes that sdX is the device entry for the SD card, where X is a letter index for the drive name on Linux (e.g., a, b).

Note: The device name shouldn't include a partition suffix. For example, do not use /dev/sda1. However, on some Linux variants, the device name can be /dev/mmcblk0 and may vary between systems.

Transferring an image using macOS

On a macOS host system, run the following commands to put the image on the SD card:

In a terminal, run diskutil umount /Volumes/VOLUME_LABEL. For example, to unmount No Name from diskX:
```
diskutil umount /Volumes/NO\ NAME/ 
```
Copy the imx8qm-mek-sd.img raw file to your SD card.
Note: You may need to run sudo to run the command.
```
sudo dd if=imx8qm-mek-sd.img of=/dev/rdiskXsY
```
This command causes the dd utility to write data to the SD card. This command assumes that rdiskXsY is the device entry for the SD card, where X is the disk number and Y is a letter index for the drive name on macOS (e.g., a, b).

Note: The device name shouldn't include a partition suffix. For example, don't use /dev/rdisk1s1.
Run diskutil to eject the disk.
```
diskutil eject /dev/rdisk1
```

Transferring an image using Windows

On a Windows system, to copy a reference image to the SD card:

If you don't already have Win32 Disk Imager on your system, download it from the following location:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/
Run Win32 Disk Imager.
Browse to the location where you unzipped the image file from the QNX Software Center and click Open.
Click Write to write the imx8qm-mek-sd.img file to your SD card.
Click Yes to begin the process of writing the image. When it's complete, you'll see the message “Write successful.”
Click OK, then exit Win32 Disk Imager.