Wireless LAN SD | Hacker News Reader

Wireless LAN SD

sdcard.org

48 pointssharpshadow29 comments

I remember - or maybe am mis-remembering - that years ago, SD cards used to exist with wifi access. I'm not sure whether you could read the card remotely? Or the card presented itself as a card, but actually streamed your data? But I remember that they existed?

But the thing that struck me even more is that - again, I may be wrong - those cards actually ran Linux? They were super tiny computers?

In a sense, I find it incredible because - is there a parallel world where we'd all be using SD cards as micro computers, and would just have small docks with usb/ethernet? These could have competed with Pis, could be deployed as micro servers..?

Anyway, if someone has real actual information, I'd love to learn more!

Actually - this article [0] seems to imply that this whole micro-world is sorta dead? But wifi SD cards are real and exist? Do they run Linux...??

[0] https://www.mbreviews.com/best-wifi-sd-card/

Indeed, you are thinking of the eye-fi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye-Fi

These made wirelessly syncing your pda a simple 8 step process back in the day.

Transcend made some too. I starred this blog in my feed reader, back in the day, w/ some exploration of their cards: https://jamesone111.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/exploring-the-t...

(Having my old feed reader archives is useful! >smile<)

I deployed many of those things successfully a decade ago. Worked great!

This was one of the use cases of the SDIO [1] specification.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#SDIO_cards

You're correct on both points.

Some early wireless cards used SDIO to communicate with the host computer. These are long gone.

There were also some later SD cards which contained an embedded controller running Linux, which emulated an SD storage card and exposed its contents over wireless. The latter are what that article was about.

I'm currently using an Ezurio WiFi/Bluetooth module in a project and it still uses SDIO to communicate with the host. Only difference is that it's a much smaller module welded down to the PCB.

The dev kit, however, still has the traditional interface.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/ezurio/453-00045-...

I have one of these $2000 SD cards in my Diamond DA40. It lets me connect my iPad to my aircraft so I can transfer updated databases, flight plans, and see real time avionics data. It's pretty cool.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/155337/

Damnnnnn that's cool but ouch. I know you're really buying the whole platform and capability and flight-worthy certification but $2K for what is basically a wifi dongle still makes my head spin.

General aviation is for billionaires with how expensive it is.

It’s sad as a regular person that I could never be able to afford to fly. Even in a 75 year old piece of garbage with a carburetor

Aside: Is the DA40 as cool as it seems? >smile<

I've flown some 172s. When the DA40 came out I thought it seemed like a really, really neat airplane. I got some marketing lit and talked to people about it from Diamond at Sun 'n Fun (in 2004, I think). It's nothing I could have even remotely approach buying then (or now, unless I wanted to live in it, I guess) but I just wanted to soak up some of the aura of the thing.

As someone who has flown it just once with an instruction, my impression was that things were a little cramped for my taste. shrug

On Cirrus Perspective+ (Garmin G1000NXi) you can just Bluetooth the flight plans over from the iPad. It's really convenient when ATC reroutes me, to just enter it on the iPad and send it over instead of fiddling with knobs/keys.

Database updates are still using SD cards though, but just a normal one as far as I know.

I own a Ben NanoNote, at this point an ancient (2010) open-source, niche micro-laptop that ran a modification of OpenWrt. With a tiny keyboard and screen and all. It had no built-in anything, so the only way to get wireless connectivity on it was to buy one of these SDIO WLAN adapters. Had a lot of fun tinkering with that thing, maybe I should find it again...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_NanoNote

Reminds me of the Eye-Fi SD cards [0] that would store photos taken with your camera and then allow you to wirelessly over your network download photos from the camera, and later would do geotagging based on visible wifi networks. 20 years ago it felt like the future.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye-Fi

I had an Eye-Fi card in my DSLR years ago and had a python script [0] running on my home server that'd download the photos as they were taken. It'd play a noise over the home audio system to let the taker know that the photo had transferred.

It worked fairly well but at some point I got nervous that it might miss a photo and switched back to a boring SD card.

[0]: https://www.returnbooleantrue.com/2009/01/eye-fi-standalone-...

SDIO is still a fairly common interface that wifi and bluetooth adapters are connected with in embedded systems. Much lower idle power and protocol complexity than either USB or PCIe. You just don't find those wireless chipsets in an SD card form factor anymore. (and even if you did, SD card adapters don't generally support SDIO)

What I’ve always wished is that I could take pictures with a nice DLSR or bridge camera and have a way to quickly load the RAWs into my phone for culling and processing. You could get the best of both worlds, better sensors and lenses, and simple developing within seconds. I know there are cameras with built-in WiFi that do this but camera manufacturers seem to let their software become outdated quickly.

The WiFi in cameras is definitively in the "do not use" category. It's usually some kind of flaky, broken, and/or slow.

I wish camera manufacturers just used Android on their devices, with possibly 5G for geotagging and time sync. It would immediately solve all the connectivity issues.

When is the last time you purchased a camera and how much did you spend? I am happy with the wireless performance of my Sony A7 SIII. I kind of splurged on it as my once in every 2 decades camera so I don't have anything to compare to besides connectivity first cameras (Drone).

I have a Sony A7 from 2019. I also tried a couple of other newer cameras from Nikon and one from Fujitsu.

What I’ve always wished is that I could take pictures with a nice DLSR or bridge camera and have a way to quickly load the RAWs into my phone for culling and processing.

Apple makes (made?) an SD Card to lightning dongle. It's a wonderful thing on vacations.

I can take the SD Card from my Hasselblad and plug it into my iPhone. I then delete photos and videos I don't want, upload the keepers to iCloud as a backup, and AirDrop pictures to my wife so she can send them to her friends.

iOS has no problem with most current raw formats, and you can even convert them to JPEGs right in the phone.

You can also import the raw images and do basic editing of the photos with the Photos app.

The only problem I've run into is with long videos sometimes being laggy. But that might be an issue with a slow card, or moving data over a Lightning interface.

Since the dawn of USB-C iOS devices (iPhone 15 onwards), you can plug any old usb card reader into an iPhone or iPad without an adapter and it works.

2023 thread that assessed things as not very good at the time:

* https://old.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/12ocr4u/the_wi...

A number of mirrorless cameras (from Sony, Canon, Nikon, etc) have built-in Wifi nowadays.

Speaking of interesting SD card features-- it would be nice to have a way to have the sd card expire. Like if it doesn't get voltage for a duration of time: it self erases.

How old is that article? It doesn't have a date on it.

I believe this was the first implementation: (https://www.ephotozine.com/article/new-toshiba-flashair-wire...)

According to the Wayback machine, the article (at least a this URL) did not exist before 2/27/2021.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210000000000*/https://www.sdca...

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