A presentation of the cross-compilation infrastructure, and the troubles and successes using it for an embedded system. In the data acquisition / instrumentation world, we often get to use embedded boards provided with a Buildroot or Yocto Linux OS. But, as the project tends to grow, these images tend to get unmaintained, which drove us to try to compile our own Linux images, using NixOS. We start with an introduction of the cross-compiling infrastructure of nixpkgs, and how you can cross-compile Nix packages, and NixOS images for embedded systems. We will then see how well it applied to our own use case, the troubles it gave us, and how different it is compared to your usual Buildroot or Yocto Linux images.