SDcard with Wireless Lan

LoopyByteloose

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i:aps,k:wifi sd cards

Do these really have a wifi interface included in the card, or has the advertising snake oil gotten so bad?

I just ran across these and am wondering if anyone has been inspired to try one with the Propeller. Frankly, I am a bit gobsmacked and very curiious.

DavidZemon

I'm still reading up on it, but it looks like the software on the SD card might be looking for specific file types, like JPGs, RAWs, or PNGs. If that's the case, I'm not hopeful that the Propeller community will find much use for them.

Heater.

Yep, legit, been around for a while. Have your camera save your pics to that and you can retrieve them over WIFI. No unplugging SD cards and moving them to your laptop/PC.

Not for general purpose communication use. Although I seem to recall that they have been hacked to allow such use.

For general purpose WIFI in an SD card look for the "Electric Imp".https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11395 Although I believe they rely on using the Electric Imp IoT cloud service.

LoopyByteloose

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11395 Has export restrictions!

Well, I went to bed last night thinking I had been taken in by some clever adversting, but now see that the SD card has morphed into something quite interesting.

We seem to have two versions - one that has both Wifi and data storage, and one that is only a Wifi interface of some sort and maybe not wired the same as a SD card (would this be expecting a USB interface for support?).

Heater.

USB has nothing to do with any of this.

SD cards with WIFI use the usual SD card interface. What is that, souped up SPI or something? Could be useful on a Prop project. Save your data as a file to the card and retrieve it over wifi. Does it work the other way though? Might have to get some and check that out.

The Electric Imp is not usable as a normal SD card despite being in the SD form factor. It's a micro controller with WIFI and some GPIO. Give it power and it's a usable machine all by itself!

LoopyByteloose

I happen to have a USB to SDcard dongle. My impression is that USB is just souped up SPI. In any event, I would be very happy if all that USB protocol is not part of either device.

USB just adds another order of magnitude of complexity. Right?? That would require more code space and potentially slower trough-put.

Heater.

Depends what you mean by "souped up SPI". USB is a very different animal, a lot more complicated and with stringent timing requirements.

At least an order of magnitude more complexity. Try browsing through the USB specs, it's a nightmare.

I'm always amazed at how hard they made it to get frikken serial I/O going on a PC's (and everything else), plug-n-play is not what I wanted. With it's millions of extra transistors and millions of lines of driver code and piles of configuration. Back in the day we just banged on a couple of registers in a UART chip, life was good....

LoopyByteloose

I am certainly NOT a fan of USB. RS232 and it's wonderful cousins RS422 and RS485 make asychronous serial interfacing that will run extend for miles and miles if one had need to.

Creating added complexity where none is required has a long and glorious history in the computer industry. IBM seemed to feel that it was a welcome way to protect turf and make rites of passage for programmers.

We have EBCDIC instead of ASCII. I suspect IBM encouraged programmers to take the keyboard away with them if they desired to protect the computer.

And of course, the original USART chips were overly complex with substantial extra and unneeded control and handshaking signals that migrated from the old teletype devices.

But the real odd ball is the PS2 serial keyboard and mouse interface that is 12 bits in one direction and 13 bits in the other.

Of course they publish copious documentation. That allows them to obfuscate the important details or perhaps, just omit a few critical features.

I suspect it all has something to do with Freemasonry.

prof_braino

We looked at wireless SD cards a while back. At $36, they are still $35 too expensive. For that cost we can get a DIR-505L or any other OpenWRT router and run a full on linux node. The next step was to mod the DIR-505L mains plug power board with a battery, but that project was pushed of the workbench by something shinier.

Heater.

Or get the 20 dollar VoCore. A tiny MIPS + WIFI module running OpenWrt:
http://vocore.io/store/index

LoopyByteloose

@Heater
Has your VoCore order arrived yet? If so, any progress?