So many devices these days use SD cards, and often during development (or even day-to-day use), you find yourself moving SD cards back and forth between SD card readers and the devices they belong to. 3D printers are a prime example of this: you create your design, then you have to grab the SD card from the printer, attach it to your computer, copy over the design, and then plug it back into the printer. This is prone to errors as well as potential filesystem issues if not ejected properly. But with the SDWire SD card interface, you can now modify the contents of an SD while it’s still connected to the device that uses it!
The interface connects to a computer via a USB-C cable, and using the software that comes with the device (called sd-mux-ctrl) you can dynamically change which device is able to read the SD card at any moment. Simply switch it from the device to the connected PC, copy files or flash an OS image to the card, and switch it back!
Not only can this be used to copy files to devices like 3D printers, but it can be attached to a single-board computer like a Raspberry Pi, and you can easily flash new OS images or transfer files to and from the board. It’s also useful if you are designing or testing an SD card interface and want to run some automated tests. I’m sure there are even more use cases I’m not thinking of — if you have any ideas, let us or the developers know!
