Super interesting! Thank you for this. I was working on a hardware project that this probably would have helped a lot with. I was writing some python but the package couldn't be compiled on my local machine so I had to run a dev server off my pi directly. I wonder if this can help.
This is exactly what I was trying to do a few months ago, but all the RPi VMs I found were a pain in the ass and I never got it to work. Ansible deployments are conveniently but take forever on RPi, golden images are great for distribution but suck to make. Using Ansible to deploy to a VM and then exporting that image for flashing is the best of both approaches.
This seems similar to <a href="https://github.com/solo-io/packer-plugin-arm-image">https://github.com/solo-io/packer-plugin-arm-image</a><p>I believe that can also work in non-RPi images, but I didn't get very far in the Pi-CI docs so maybe that does too.
Neat!<p>> The default image is 2 gigabytes in size. This can be increased (but not decreased!) through the resize command.<p>Is this the smallest size of an industrial SD card these days?