14 ms·

Chat server on a WiFi-enabled SD card

73 points by l00sed 6y ago

jaywalk 6y ago
It appears that the linked web page may also be running on a WiFi-enabled SD card and can't handle the load.
- stx 6y ago
  They just didn't use the right SD card. You need a class 11 Super ULTRA Extreme SD card made by some specific brand.
  - arthurcolle 6y ago
    No, unfortunately the high-throughput firmware is reserved for the class 11 Super ULTRA Extreme PRO SD card
  - soganess 6y ago
    Only if you are a filthy causal, specific brand vertically integrated sd cards are so 2019. So what you need to do, if you are serious about this micro server business, is buy a 1.5TB optane 905p and slot it into a pcie x4 to m.2 adapter. From there you will need a M.2 nvme to usb converter(make sure you don't get a SATA-only one). I like to strip out the inside of a tuff nano, but any will do. Now that you have your drive basics setup, you will need a type c to type a usb cable so that you can plug this into a Pi4. You could use the usb c port on the Pi4, but then how will you power the pi4, dummie? From there you will have to write a small driver that translates sd protocol commands to usb mass storage commands. Now get some wires and solder the Pi4's GPIO pins (the ones you used as I/O for your driver) to the micro sd pins on the adapter. And that's it, now you have a real SD card that is actually fast enough to run your server from an SDIO adapter! Wasn't that easy? Plus this way you didn't have to give $am$ung or $andisk any of your money.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    We're all being funny, but I definitely have my eye on using underpowered servers along with a more JAMStack-flavored design so that some projects I'm working on stay available even when the load essentially kills all updates. All the way back in Slashdot Effect days I recall a couple of people getting clever with Referer (sic) headers to detect someone on a tech news site linking to your website. In those cases they would redirect to a public cache, like Google's, reducing origin server traffic to a few packets per request. I always found that to be way more clever than people gave it credit for.
  - russh 6y ago
    Damn, the salesman did say I was taking an awful risk not getting the MonsterCable(tm) Super Extra ULTRA Extra Extreme SD+ card but I wasn't prepared for the extra $129.99 it cost over my SanDisk.
- l00sed 6y ago
  I'm sorry, I need to figure out how to handle traffic better/dynamically.. Still learning. I was thinking it would be cool to leave websites "in the wild" though, like something solar powered that would stay alive and could be accessed in the area. Or something with a short lifespan that's battery powered...
  - nurettin 6y ago
    ...and somehow pay for its rx/tx costs
    - withjive 6y ago
      For small range (few km) you can just utilise LoraWAN for free communication.
      - l00sed 6y ago
        This is a technology that is very interesting to me, but I have not gotten my hands on it yet. I know there were some Italians who had gotten some 100s of km using LoRa (I think it was testing for the Guifi network)
    - codefined 6y ago
      > could be accessed in the area If you didn't want remote access you would not have to pay rx/tx costs.
  - stx 6y ago
    It could be cool for creating some equivalent of wifi geocaching. Small simple websites that you need to get within a specific area to access.
  - crazy_monkey 6y ago
    I haven't tried it for a big site before, but hosting on github is "free" and/or makes load Mircosoft's problem.
  - akerro 6y ago
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Oh, it does. You just can't handle the wait :)
kanobo 6y ago
Site is down. The words 'WiFi-enabled SD card' makes my imagination flow. I think in the future you'll have one SD card with all the electronics/computing power and you just insert it into various dummy devices to change it's capabilities.
- _jal 6y ago
  The original NeXT vision was optical drives. You'd keep your $HOME directory on one and plug in to whatever machine you were in front of. I remember when the iPhone came out, I wondered if the idea would be updated, but no. Of course the world went more in the direction of Sun's network computer/JavaStation idea, where other people's computers substitute for the optical/SD card.
  - pxeboot 6y ago
    There was a "Home on iPod" feature available in at least a beta version of OS X [1]. I remember testing it at one point. [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/03/12/01/apple_tweaking_home_on_ipod_feature_for_release https://appleinsider.com/articles/03/12/01/apple_tweaking_ho...
    - threeio 6y ago
      i remember that feature and dreaming of how awesome it would be... sigh.
- Lammy 6y ago
  Search ‘SDIO’ as a starting point :)
- l00sed 6y ago
  That is a sick idea. Just saw another post today about a pure JS os. Really interesting thought.
- netsharc 6y ago
  As Lammy said, it's not new. There was Eye-Fi, which was an SD card for cameras, but with a WiFi module so you can grab pictures off it from your computer. And there was SDIO, which was a WiFi module for your non-WiFi Palm Pilot, which you'd plug into your SD card slot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqn_WpFSH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqn_WpFSH4 And, you can even reprogram the microcontroller inside seemingly normal (micro-)SD cards: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554
RyJones 6y ago
wish I still had all of those old Eye-Fi cards
Teever 6y ago
The site is down but I'm assuming that this is making use of one of those old SD-cards that had wifi built in to turn old old point and shoot cameras into wifi devices. I remember someone got linux running on one of them and ever since then I wish that that form-factor for small computing had taken off. Imagine if the raspberry pi people made devices like this.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  There are lots of SD card sized devices out there. A bit thicker because of packaging, but, still pretty small. On a slightly different take, Octavo makes Pi Zero like devices (single core, 512MB) but with Ethernet and (IIRC) eMMC memory within a single package itself smaller than an SD card. I would love to design a board with a couple of them and a network switch.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Look into VoCore2, it’s a modern-ish Linux SBC in a very small form factor: https://vocore.io/v2u.html https://vocore.io/v2u.html.
  - chemeng 6y ago
    This is very cool though a touch pricey. Do you have any hands on experience with them? How's the quality?
    - botto 6y ago
      It's goodish, the firmware is hard to get right and the chip itself gets waaaarm
- zymhan 6y ago
  Anyone remember the Palm Wifi SDIO card? I always wanted one for my Zire 72...
- rsync 6y ago
  "... and ever since then I wish that that form-factor for small computing had taken off." I know how you feel, but the form factor I prefer is PCMCIA[1]. Interestingly, someone did, in fact, attempt to create a small, modular, computing standard based on PCMCIA - the card was a compute module that could be inserted into a shell laptop ... I cannot find the link, unfortunately ... [1] "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms"
noman-land 6y ago
Since this site is dead right now. Here's something similar to read about in the meantime. https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-is-a-tiny-linux-server/ https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-is-a-...
- l00sed 6y ago
  Sorry mane.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
timonoko 6y ago
This is how you start ftp-server in the SD-card. I have never found any other useful application you could start yourself: SDCARD/$ cat autorun.sh telnetd -l /bin/bash & tcpsvd -vE 0.0.0.0 21 ftpd &
- timonoko 6y ago
  Oh. There is telnet too. Funny but not useful.
dou4cc 6y ago
archived google cache: https://archive.vn/pYoTM https://archive.vn/pYoTM
- l00sed 6y ago
  Hey, that's cool! thanks!
hinkley 6y ago
I'm mostly of the opinion now that we should just treat our computers as a network of connected computers all doing special jobs. For instance, why not treat a hardware RAID controller as on-board NAS, or even run PostgreSQL (or even just SQLite) directly on the card? You buffer a bottleneck by controlling the ingress, the egress, or both (eg, a caching proxy server with gzip compression), but these days we don't see 'or both' as often as maybe we used to.
- comboy 6y ago
  You can treat your NAS as a hardware RAID controller. You will get similar performance as you would get from treating your hardware RAID controller as an on-board NAS.
hinkley 6y ago
I remember when these cards were new, every month or so you'd see a story about someone recovering their fancy digital camera because the doofus who stole it didn't realize the SD card was phoning home.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Needs moaarr links for sinking time, like so: [0] https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-is-a-tiny-linux-server/ https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-is-a-... Modifying Transcend WiFi SD Card Firmware (fernjager.net) Apr 25, 2014 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647434 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160509130411/http://www.fernjager.net/post-8/sdcard https://web.archive.org/web/20160509130411/http://www.fernja... [3] https://jamesone111.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/exploring-the-transcend-wifi-sd-card/ https://jamesone111.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/exploring-the-t... Transcend WifiSD / PQI AirCard / FluCard Pro, 16 Aug 2013 [4] https://forum.archive.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=45820&p=1 https://forum.archive.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=45820&p=1 [5] http://haxit.blogspot.com/2013/08/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-cards.html http://haxit.blogspot.com/2013/08/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-... [6] https://elinux.org/Wifi_SD https://elinux.org/Wifi_SD Now the only question reamains if this applies to any currently available product at all, or if things changed so much that it doesn't work anymore.

73 points by l00sed 6y ago

jaywalk 6y ago

It appears that the linked web page may also be running on a WiFi-enabled SD card and can't handle the load.

stx 6y ago
They just didn't use the right SD card. You need a class 11 Super ULTRA Extreme SD card made by some specific brand.
- arthurcolle 6y ago
  No, unfortunately the high-throughput firmware is reserved for the class 11 Super ULTRA Extreme PRO SD card
- soganess 6y ago
  Only if you are a filthy causal, specific brand vertically integrated sd cards are so 2019. So what you need to do, if you are serious about this micro server business, is buy a 1.5TB optane 905p and slot it into a pcie x4 to m.2 adapter. From there you will need a M.2 nvme to usb converter(make sure you don't get a SATA-only one). I like to strip out the inside of a tuff nano, but any will do. Now that you have your drive basics setup, you will need a type c to type a usb cable so that you can plug this into a Pi4. You could use the usb c port on the Pi4, but then how will you power the pi4, dummie? From there you will have to write a small driver that translates sd protocol commands to usb mass storage commands. Now get some wires and solder the Pi4's GPIO pins (the ones you used as I/O for your driver) to the micro sd pins on the adapter. And that's it, now you have a real SD card that is actually fast enough to run your server from an SDIO adapter! Wasn't that easy? Plus this way you didn't have to give $am$ung or $andisk any of your money.
- hinkley 6y ago
  We're all being funny, but I definitely have my eye on using underpowered servers along with a more JAMStack-flavored design so that some projects I'm working on stay available even when the load essentially kills all updates. All the way back in Slashdot Effect days I recall a couple of people getting clever with Referer (sic) headers to detect someone on a tech news site linking to your website. In those cases they would redirect to a public cache, like Google's, reducing origin server traffic to a few packets per request. I always found that to be way more clever than people gave it credit for.
- russh 6y ago
  Damn, the salesman did say I was taking an awful risk not getting the MonsterCable(tm) Super Extra ULTRA Extra Extreme SD+ card but I wasn't prepared for the extra $129.99 it cost over my SanDisk.
l00sed 6y ago
I'm sorry, I need to figure out how to handle traffic better/dynamically.. Still learning. I was thinking it would be cool to leave websites "in the wild" though, like something solar powered that would stay alive and could be accessed in the area. Or something with a short lifespan that's battery powered...
- nurettin 6y ago
  ...and somehow pay for its rx/tx costs
  - withjive 6y ago
    For small range (few km) you can just utilise LoraWAN for free communication.
    - l00sed 6y ago
      This is a technology that is very interesting to me, but I have not gotten my hands on it yet. I know there were some Italians who had gotten some 100s of km using LoRa (I think it was testing for the Guifi network)
  - codefined 6y ago
    > could be accessed in the area If you didn't want remote access you would not have to pay rx/tx costs.
- stx 6y ago
  It could be cool for creating some equivalent of wifi geocaching. Small simple websites that you need to get within a specific area to access.
- crazy_monkey 6y ago
  I haven't tried it for a big site before, but hosting on github is "free" and/or makes load Mircosoft's problem.
- akerro 6y ago
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Oh, it does. You just can't handle the wait :)

kanobo 6y ago

Site is down. The words 'WiFi-enabled SD card' makes my imagination flow. I think in the future you'll have one SD card with all the electronics/computing power and you just insert it into various dummy devices to change it's capabilities.

_jal 6y ago
The original NeXT vision was optical drives. You'd keep your $HOME directory on one and plug in to whatever machine you were in front of. I remember when the iPhone came out, I wondered if the idea would be updated, but no. Of course the world went more in the direction of Sun's network computer/JavaStation idea, where other people's computers substitute for the optical/SD card.
- pxeboot 6y ago
  There was a "Home on iPod" feature available in at least a beta version of OS X [1]. I remember testing it at one point. [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/03/12/01/apple_tweaking_home_on_ipod_feature_for_release https://appleinsider.com/articles/03/12/01/apple_tweaking_ho...
  - threeio 6y ago
    i remember that feature and dreaming of how awesome it would be... sigh.
Lammy 6y ago
Search ‘SDIO’ as a starting point :)
l00sed 6y ago
That is a sick idea. Just saw another post today about a pure JS os. Really interesting thought.
netsharc 6y ago
As Lammy said, it's not new. There was Eye-Fi, which was an SD card for cameras, but with a WiFi module so you can grab pictures off it from your computer. And there was SDIO, which was a WiFi module for your non-WiFi Palm Pilot, which you'd plug into your SD card slot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqn_WpFSH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqn_WpFSH4 And, you can even reprogram the microcontroller inside seemingly normal (micro-)SD cards: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

RyJones 6y ago

wish I still had all of those old Eye-Fi cards

Teever 6y ago

The site is down but I'm assuming that this is making use of one of those old SD-cards that had wifi built in to turn old old point and shoot cameras into wifi devices. I remember someone got linux running on one of them and ever since then I wish that that form-factor for small computing had taken off. Imagine if the raspberry pi people made devices like this.

rbanffy 6y ago
There are lots of SD card sized devices out there. A bit thicker because of packaging, but, still pretty small. On a slightly different take, Octavo makes Pi Zero like devices (single core, 512MB) but with Ethernet and (IIRC) eMMC memory within a single package itself smaller than an SD card. I would love to design a board with a couple of them and a network switch.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Look into VoCore2, it’s a modern-ish Linux SBC in a very small form factor: https://vocore.io/v2u.html https://vocore.io/v2u.html.
- chemeng 6y ago
  This is very cool though a touch pricey. Do you have any hands on experience with them? How's the quality?
  - botto 6y ago
    It's goodish, the firmware is hard to get right and the chip itself gets waaaarm
zymhan 6y ago
Anyone remember the Palm Wifi SDIO card? I always wanted one for my Zire 72...
rsync 6y ago
"... and ever since then I wish that that form-factor for small computing had taken off." I know how you feel, but the form factor I prefer is PCMCIA[1]. Interestingly, someone did, in fact, attempt to create a small, modular, computing standard based on PCMCIA - the card was a compute module that could be inserted into a shell laptop ... I cannot find the link, unfortunately ... [1] "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms"

noman-land 6y ago

Since this site is dead right now. Here's something similar to read about in the meantime. https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-is-a-tiny-linux-server/ https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-is-a-...

l00sed 6y ago
Sorry mane.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

timonoko 6y ago

This is how you start ftp-server in the SD-card. I have never found any other useful application you could start yourself: SDCARD/$ cat autorun.sh telnetd -l /bin/bash & tcpsvd -vE 0.0.0.0 21 ftpd &

timonoko 6y ago
Oh. There is telnet too. Funny but not useful.

dou4cc 6y ago

archived google cache: https://archive.vn/pYoTM https://archive.vn/pYoTM

l00sed 6y ago
Hey, that's cool! thanks!

hinkley 6y ago

I'm mostly of the opinion now that we should just treat our computers as a network of connected computers all doing special jobs. For instance, why not treat a hardware RAID controller as on-board NAS, or even run PostgreSQL (or even just SQLite) directly on the card? You buffer a bottleneck by controlling the ingress, the egress, or both (eg, a caching proxy server with gzip compression), but these days we don't see 'or both' as often as maybe we used to.

comboy 6y ago
You can treat your NAS as a hardware RAID controller. You will get similar performance as you would get from treating your hardware RAID controller as an on-board NAS.

hinkley 6y ago

I remember when these cards were new, every month or so you'd see a story about someone recovering their fancy digital camera because the doofus who stole it didn't realize the SD card was phoning home.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

Needs moaarr links for sinking time, like so: [0] https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-is-a-tiny-linux-server/ https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/transcend-wifi-sd-card-is-a-... Modifying Transcend WiFi SD Card Firmware (fernjager.net) Apr 25, 2014 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647434 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160509130411/http://www.fernjager.net/post-8/sdcard https://web.archive.org/web/20160509130411/http://www.fernja... [3] https://jamesone111.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/exploring-the-transcend-wifi-sd-card/ https://jamesone111.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/exploring-the-t... Transcend WifiSD / PQI AirCard / FluCard Pro, 16 Aug 2013 [4] https://forum.archive.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=45820&p=1 https://forum.archive.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=45820&p=1 [5] http://haxit.blogspot.com/2013/08/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-cards.html http://haxit.blogspot.com/2013/08/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-... [6] https://elinux.org/Wifi_SD https://elinux.org/Wifi_SD Now the only question reamains if this applies to any currently available product at all, or if things changed so much that it doesn't work anymore.