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.
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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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 thought it was cool.
I recently looked into them. They seem shit. Dodgey outdated apps to make them work and such.
That's another reason why they're kinda dead now. Closeted apps they have to maintain just to keep that garden walled, and it was a cost they decided they also didn't want to spend.
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
If you're interested and can get your hands on some kind of SBC (like a raspberry pi) Klipper has been amazing for my printer. You can also use pretty much any computer but it'll be much less efficient energy wise.
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.
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.
I had a much better experience with Klipper once I got it up and going
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?
Not literally inside, but yeah, it needs a computer (Raspberry Pi 3 in my case).
Right, this would allow wireless transfers without a computer.
A Pi 3b or Zero w would run it just fine
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.
Yep, had one for my Treo in 2006
CompactFlash, too. I 'member looking at them for a Dell PocketPC I found at a garage sale.
I had an early PDA (think it was an IPAQ, not to be confused with ipad) that had a 56k modem that connected via CF slot.
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.