I still have a 4gb Eye-Fi that use just as an SD card to shuttle files out to my laser cutter. I assume the wi-Fi would be horrendously slow and insecure if it worked at all. Was pretty cool when we still had a standalone P&S digital camera though.
CompactFlash, too. I 'member looking at them for a Dell PocketPC I found at a garage sale.
Yup. It was used to transfer photos from a camera to a phone back in the day when cameras didn’t have wireless transfer features.
They’ve been around for a while. I used one with a 5D MkII several years ago. Horrible throughput. It was only useful for a quick transfer of a few images. Totally unsuitable for field dumps.
I recently looked into them. They seem shit. Dodgey outdated apps to make them work and such.
I tried them with a few different cameras. They sucked. They wouldn’t reliably connect to Wi-Fi, and they didn’t reliably upload images.
Too bad it should be the simplest way to add wifi file transfer to a 3d printer
I’d rather just have an ethernet port on the damn printer. You shouldn’t have to cludge together basic network device functionality on devices that expensive
It’s better to just install klipper on a pi or other SBC
At least my 3d printer was so inexpensive it’s silly.
I’m pretty happy that the engineering team that built it doesn’t need to worry about networking code and maintaining a networked device. Jappy that an open source community does it instead.
The old Toshiba ones could run a WebDAV server on them and you could log in with a PC and upload files. Was pretty sweet in a flash cart.
Things like this would be so useful in the tinkering community, so many motherboards and such use micro SD cards or USB drives as a primary storage device. Before I gutted my 3d printer and put a computer inside it, I had to schlep the micro SD card back and forth from the printer to the computer room… being able to send it wireless would’ve been great. Looked into it at the time but as other have said all the current solutions are dog shit.
Well, Octoprint worked well for me.
Oh I’m way past octoprint and have advanced to klipper, it just would be nice for similar applications, or for people who don’t want to set up something similar.
Doesn’t octoprint need a computer inside the printer though?
A Pi 3b or Zero w would run it just fine
Not literally inside, but yeah, it needs a computer (Raspberry Pi 3 in my case).
Right, this would allow wireless transfers without a computer.
Yep, had one for my Treo in 2006
So what does it do, exactly? Can it act like a NIC or something?
Most of them act(ed) like an access point.
However, the SDIO spec allows for cursed applications like WiFi adapters, Bluetooth dongles, and more to be fitted into an SD card. It was really just SPI, so in theory it also allowed things like GPS tranceivers and any other peripheral you can think of that’s low bandwidth enough to work over SPI. Need Bluetooth for your Palm PDA? Here you go! Just stick a massive slab of plastic into the SD card slot!
These days SDIO is only really used for alternative (faster) transfer modes and maybe some slow and insecure WiFi access points in cameras.
Acts as access point, if you connect to it from another device you get access to stuff on the SD card (via app or built-in webserver)… at least in theory. Quality varies.
Mine acted like a wifi card. I could connect to wifi networks with it.
Worked for shit, but it did work… Just enough.
Still use mine in my cannon point and shoot. (Just as a storage device though) The software support has long ago suckified when “cloud” became all the rage, but it was awesome to sync camera <-> PC without messing with adapters or cables.
There are also horseless carriages.
