When you set up your OFM once, and use it that way, maybe you’re fine. However, when you’re tinkering around, sometimes reflash your OFM to test certain features, removing the micro-sd-card for that purpose is much more hassle than it should be.
Because this was a constant annoyance to me, i decided to look up some micro-sd-to-miicro-sd-card-extenders. The longest one i could find on aliexpress was 25cm (most are 10cm), which is barely long enough to mount it where I wanted it to. Most certainly it would be much better to incorporate an sd-card-slot into the main lower body, however, i liked the idea of punching a hole into one of the motor-cable-covers. The hole where the led-cables run through cannot be used for this (it is just barely too small, +~1.5mm bigger on X and Y would be enough for a micro-sd-card to fit through).
On my design, i am not sure, if the sd-card can actually collide with the slide, so the final version is a few millimeters shorter than the version in the pictures.
I would really like to see some kind of “sd-card-slot reachable without dismantling”-part as part of the standard-set of parts of the OFM.
As i am currently learning FreeCAD, the model is this time not designed in OpenSCAD. However, as I said: this is more of an Idea, not the ideal placement of the sd-card. If anyone else can make use of it, i’ll attach the STL anyways.
This touches on a point of tension, in how we support different types of users. The main instructions are didactic, with a small number of curated options. This serves new and less confident users well and has a philosophy of ‘build it and use it’ which means that it deliberately has no access to the SD card.
There are the other users, like you and the dev team and many others, who want to change everything often. That group wants all the customisations, even ones that need soldering and programming. We have not offered a version of the draw and base with a hole for access to the card, though it would be simple to do that from the source, or in a slicer.
I think part of the software roadmap is for simplified updates (or is it already in there?). You can even do first flash of the newer Pi OS over network with a fresh SD card installed in the Pi. I have not tried that with our software, but now the OpenFlexure system disk image works with Pi Imager 2 I think that it is automatically possible.
Not that any if those are in any way better than the hardware solution, just different options for different use cases.
Yeah, I am absolutely aware of that, and in a standard-usecase you might even want to not have physical access to the sd-card-slot.
however, i think an option for tinkerers out of the part-building-CI-chain is helpful anyways. Look at my part for example: it has an extra hole, because it was derived from the last revision of cable-tidies, which has an extra hole, my scope has not. while this change isn’t incompatible, other might be, so a part derived from the current scad-parameter-set would always work for that particular version of the scope (unless something unexpected happens of course ).
This is super useful if we are regularly testing SD card images, which we do when we build them for release. Thank you. I didn’t even know SD card extenders were a thing!
Full over the air switiching of the base image will cause data and preset loss, so we would want to manage it very carefully if that was the plan. I am hoping we will get OS updates sorted by putting more and more of the custom elements of the os into a .deb. But I don’t yet have a roadmap for this and would need to understand more. If anyone has OS packaging experience I would love some advice (@ffesti perhaps?).
those exteders are nothing special but a glorified cable. they came in all different flavors: sd to sd, sd to micro-sd, micro-to-micro, and so on… the potential downside is, that they are normally build for low-throughput applications, like 3d-printers back in the day (even tough they normally used regular ribbon cables) and things like sdcard as storage device for config or e.G. mapdata (in cars). what i am worried about is how they will withstand high throughput like…running an OS from it, or EMI-safety (because in my case it is running next to a motor cable…).
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