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One thing I've always been curious about is hardware for mass-writing of sdcards. I've setup manufacturing stations for this and I've never been able to find t
by crispyambulance 5y ago
One thing I've always been curious about is hardware for mass-writing of sdcards.
I've setup manufacturing stations for this and I've never been able to find truly robust gang-programmers for sdcards. Luckily my stuff was all low volume so it wasn't a serious problem.
But it seems like there's no "manufacturing grade" gang programmers for sdcards. The stuff that is out there is just infinitely re-branded chinese "white-label" hardware-- just a lot of different "vendors" for a few different models of the basically the same hardware.
My suspicion for there not being good options for gang-programming of sdcards is that savvy consumer manufacturers have realized what a headache it is to support sdcards in their products from the factory and thus opt to make the sdcard the customer's responsibility. In other words, they ship their products without sdcards and just require the customer to purchase the sdcard and program it if needed. I am not sure if my suspicions are justified, can anyone confirm if this is the case?
- rkangel 5y agoIf you buy them in volume, you can buy them with the data already on from the manufacturer. I'm pretty sure it's programmed into the flash before the flash is assembled into the sdcard packaging. You can do a similar thing with microcontrollers - if you're buying sufficient volume the manufacturer will supply them with your program already on, saving you a manufacturing step.
- crispyambulance 5y agoYes, I've done that before for flash IC's. It works out nicely for "large enough" order quantities. I would expect that doing that for sdcards would require even larger quantities to be economically viable.
- moondev 5y agoThere is no reason at all to boot a raspberry pi 4 from an sdcard in 2021. It's the wrong tool for the job and the worst option you can choose. https://github.com/pftf/RPi4 https://github.com/pftf/RPi4 enables several alternatives, all faster and more reliable * usb3 -> sata * usb3 -> nvme * iscsi * ipxe * netboot.xyz via pxe or usb * usb thumbdrive
- swiley 5y agoWith stuff like this the "right tool" is whatever you have and usb3 -> sata adapters aren't all that common while functioning SD cards are. Yeah there are crappy ones but if you stick to ~2GB and decent vendors (like most people do) you're unlikely to deal with them.
- moondev 5y agoI just checked and it looks like netboot.xyz provides an sdcard image so no excuses :) https://boot.netboot.xyz/ipxe/netboot.xyz-rpi4-sdcard.img https://boot.netboot.xyz/ipxe/netboot.xyz-rpi4-sdcard.img Edit - ok I guess being airgapped would be one, fair enough!
- monocasa 5y agoDecent vendors don't save you at scale, until you're in the millions of units per year kind of scale. Until the all but the 'industrial' cards are crappy. I've had the displeasure of trying to track down their issues before professionally.
- joezydeco 5y agoI hope you guys get eMMC someday. It's great.
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoDepends on which RPi you use, the Compute Module 4 comes in 2/8/16/32MB eMMC flavors[1] 1: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/
- marcodiego 5y agoIf you have no external drive or network with a "boot server" like is probable most cases of use with RPi, is there a better option than an sdcard? Also, how is a usb thumbdrive better than a sdcard?
- 5y ago
- bradstewart 5y agohttps://www.balena.io/etcher/pro https://www.balena.io/etcher/pro
- crispyambulance 5y agoOhhh! that's new! I will bookmark.