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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

Overkill but much easier from a technical point of view considering what was used to make the cartridge.

My first thought would have been to connect the two PIs with a serial interface. Sure, that's another two pins to connect between camera and cartridge, but on the surface it still sounds easier than setting up a reliable ad-hock wifi. The fact that it would use magnitudes less energy is a bonus.

Of course it might be that OP evaluated that and decided against it for good reasons.

But then you need to worry about other things and it's also likely much slower.

Ethernet just works it's an established protocol and there aren't that many easy ways to transfer files other than it today that work out of the box and with any combination of hardware and software.

> you need to worry about other things

Serial I/O is common Hello World example for Raspberry Pi. I think you have to worry about less things than adhoc wifi networks.

> likely much slower

It's slower, but not much slower. The baud rate can be set up to 4,000,000, where a megabyte would transfer in 2 seconds. These "gifs" don't seem to be more than 10 seconds long, so they should be less than 1 MB, judging from random Giphy mp4s.

Is common yes but not as easy you can't easily setup file transfer over serial, in this case a simple FTP to a pre determined folder that the screen grabs the gifs from is a heck of a lot easier to setup than sending a binary file over serial.

Serial?

No, connect them via the USB and configure one of them to appear as a USB Network Interface. Point-to-point connection established. Plenty of HOWTO's available.

Yes, but again this adds complexity. If you use USB you can also emulate one as an MMC device. But overall wifi is simple and guaranteed to work. If this was a product then going the SD card or a "proprietary" protocol is the way to go. But if you are using Ethernet then wifi or wire is simpler. In this case it's also less to worry about electro-mechanical connections.

I needed a wireless connection so the cartridge could slide out completely

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