The rantings of a madman - concept 1

Has anyone made a USB break-out cable from the back of an SD-card?
My thought is that perhaps the data going to an SD card slot pins, could be used to read/write to a hard drive. This would no doubt require an Arduino interface between the SD and for example USB external HD.
I'm debating with myself how useful this may actually be, and at this stage I'm settling for 'I dunno.'
Potential uses could be to interface with butt-monkey devices that don't have a USB interface.
The attached picture is Micro of course, but it would work with an SD View attachment 160794 adapter, a USB controller and cut the socket end off and add a USB socket. Voila! Why would anyone do that? :wtf:

Comments

The Real Jdbye
Actually there is a MicroSD to USB adapter. It's expensive and barely works though. It's also not able to work with hard drives, only flash drives.
It should be possible to make something that actually works, it would need to be relatively powerful though. An Arduino is much too slow to interface with USB, it can barely read/write SD cards at any usable speed.
Maybe a Raspberry Pi? It has USB and the GPIO operates on 3.3v just like a SD card. But a RTOS might be needed to bitbang the GPIO bus with any accuracy.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 person
FAST6191
The CF memory card standard is in fact IDE/PATA in a slightly tweaked form factor. Indeed before SSDs dropped in price then a lot of people used to use adapters to go from CF to IDE in laptops.

Various things in the SD form factor also do fun things like give devices some form of wifi if they did not have it before. The SD interface also includes a fairly common electronics communication protocol called SPI. It sees various uses ranging from recovery to not having to implement full SD protocol in a small space when you are making a device with limited capabilities (usually low cost, small size, and/or low power draw but can also include when hacking devices). https://hackaday.com/2013/08/19/rescuing-an-sd-card-with-an-arduino/ has some more on that one.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 person
brickmaker
Thanks The Real Jdbye and FAST6191 for all the extra info. It's all fascinating to me - the same old story of the more I know and then realise there's so much more to learn. From an early age I had the fascination of trying to understand how everything works. Disassembling and (hopefully!) reassembling toys and usually broken devices to see what makes them tick. I am usually quick to find a solution to repair broken devices to give them extra life, or emergency repairs when needed. I can look at a mechanical device and spot the likely failure point, or re-design it to make it better. I should get back to my bourbon and coke, my waffling on here seems to be going no-where! :grog: Thanks for the insight on Arduino vs Ras PI 'TRJ', and 'FAST' for the info on SD cards. CHEERS!!!
 

Blog entry information

Author
brickmaker
Views
150
Comments
6
Last update

More entries in Personal Blogs

More entries from brickmaker

Share this entry

General chit-chat
Help Users
    SylverReZ @ SylverReZ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV8dBxGdNxk