Most people who play with the Raspberry Pi download Raspbian as a starting point and then add whatever software they need on top. It's the sensible approach if you're comfortable playing with Linux. And while much of my development is done that way, I wanted something a little more "Flash and Play" for those who weren't super comfortable in Linux.

The Yocto Project (https://www.yoctoproject.org) is an open source project backed by lots of major vendors. It isn't a Linux distribution as such, but rather a way to build your own Linux distribution. And while I'm not interested in competing against Debian anytime soon, what I do want is an image that comes preconfigured for the 8BitRobots module.

I encourage you to go read about the Yocto Project and then take a look at my 8BitRobots meta layer (found here https://github.com/aanon4/meta-8bitrobots) which defines and configures all the extra bits you need to boot up an 8BitRobots node. 

The image is flashed onto an SD card (I recommend the wonderful Etcher https://etcher.io for this), plugged into the Pi and booted up. The node appears as a wifi access point (with the name 8BitRobot-XXXX) which you connect to and go from there.