Monitoring microSD Image Burning with Pipe Viewer

As a Raspberry Pi fan, I frequently burn different images onto multiple microSD cards to test new distros. The process can be frustrating due to the lack of feedback while writing the image. That’s why I started looking for a solution—and I found Pipe Viewer (pv).

What is Pipe Viewer?

Pipe Viewer is a terminal-based tool that allows you to monitor the progress of data through a pipeline. This is particularly useful when writing large images to microSD cards.

Installing Pipe Viewer

If you're on macOS, install it using Homebrew:

brew install pv

For Linux, check your package manager. On Debian-based systems:

sudo apt install pv

Burning an Image to a microSD Card with Progress Monitoring

Once your microSD card is inserted and the image is downloaded, use the following command to burn the image while getting real-time progress updates:

dd if=/path/to/2017-04-10-raspbian-jessie.img | pv | dd of=/dev/your_disk

Instead of waiting blindly, pv will provide feedback like this:

87.3MiB 0:07:24 [ 178KiB/s] [ <=>								]

Now you have a simple way to track the progress of image burning! 😃