Mailing SD cards in their final form in a regular envelope is not secure. An adversary can intercept and reformat, and folks will be none the wiser unless you provide some kind of tedious 3rd party integrity-check tool. I realize this is probably unlikely, but still, like.. why?
Flashing from a reliable source is the gold standard.
I suspect what the author initially hoped to make was a physical offline consumer device, like a classic TomTom or a ReMarkable. But then they seem to have noticed that's not a one-person job, so they've reduced their scope to selling an SD card that plugs into an off-the-shelf Olimex dev board. Mailing the SD card is them keeping their dream of being a physical hardware business alive.
I want to make the experience as seamless as possible given the constraints, and popping the SD card in the slot is the best I came up with so far.
Having said that, the comment by tjohns below made me rethink some things. I may end up providing both the download link, and also mail the SD card.
> Mailing SD cards in their final form in a regular envelope is not secure. An adversary could intercept and reformat, and it'd be tough to tell. I realize this is unlikely, but still, I'm like.. why?
I agree. It's a poor medium for many different reasons. However, if I can sell these, then I can sunset them and start working on the actual electronic device, which will house the OS and software on eMMC or SSD.
[1]: https://hackaday.com/2013/11/12/keep-your-sd-cards-data-safe...
Long story, short: customers can just stick in the device, without having to figure out how to image an SD card.
Edit: I couldn't find a good video but skip to 4 minutes in this is perhaps relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQBjRF9mX1Y Cheesy cheesy video but kinda sciency.
I bet it is enough not to move around in the envelope. I guess there are anti-static bags if paranoid.
Here is one I’ve found for example [0], although a double sided one might “look more professional”.
Er, what?
A person was riding their bicycle and had cold hands, as they rode with cold hands they pondered why no one had ever created heated grips for bicycles. They reach out to others, and a project begins. The momentum builds until someone mentions to the group that no one had done this because gloves were a perfectly viable solution to cold hands. Gloves.
> https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_complicator_0x27_s_glov...
4, and NanoSD is the smallest, although the size difference isn't as big as between the other 3
[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/what-is-nano-memory-968723/
Even the initial “Q&A” post seems to assume some basic existing knowledge of the project.
What about putting the microSD into an adapter [1] first? I imagine you can find a much better deal when ordering in bulk.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-microSD-Memory-Adapter-MICROS...
https://abra-electronics.com/robotics-embedded-electronics/r...
I used to ship micro-sd cards in plastic cases through the mail, here in the UK. At first I used standard DL (letter) envelopes, since they are cheap and the case inside the envelope didn't push it over any depth size limits.
However, when I got two angry support emails for having sent them "empty envelopes", I had to ask them for photos, which both showed a small sd-card-case sized hole along one short edge, with some tell-tale marks. What was happening was the leading edge of the envelope was going through some kind of thinly-spaced rollers, pushing the case to the rear end of the envelope, and then the rollers had such a grip on the envelope that they squeezed the sd card out through the corner of the envelope like a squeezing a pip out of a lemon.
So I had to move to padded envelopes, which were then a more consistent depth over the whole length of the envelope, and so they worked fine in the mail machines. But that upgrade ate into my margins since I was only working on a small scale.
It's little details like these cause vague statements like "It is normally recommended to use bubble wrap to protect SD cards in transit" - lessons learned the hard way!
Wtf. I had no idea there was a 'mini' size between standard and micro. Never seen them in the wild.
My favorite was the was the stack I'd use for MicroSD cards:
MicroSD to Mini SD > MiniSD to regular SD > SD to Compact Flash > CompactFlash to PCMCIA/CardBus
This stack of widgets (5, including the card itself) worked fine -- it wasn't fast, but fast wasn't a goal. They all nested together in a fairly durable form that was the size of one Type I PCMCIA device. No wires.
I'm with the person you're responding to. It's not clear from this description what he's doing, but it sounds like he's gluing paper to something (the envelop itself?) and then using gummy glue to attach the card to the thicker piece of paper. Credit cards just come attached to a piece of paper that is not, itself, attached to anything else. It's not obvious to me why he'd do it this way.
I mean, I understand why they don't like to do this, dealing with the end user is a huge pain, it is much easier to deal with the distributors and have them deal with the end user. So barring direct sales I wish supply chain auditing was easier for for us end users. the best you tend to get is a "distributers" link on the manufacturers website, most of whom are b2b only distribution that are not happy selling low volume directly to you ether.
Yes, you will pay more for an SD card from one of these places than on Amazon. But not insanely so. That is the price of assurance.
(My own trick is to just buy cards from one of Microcenter's house brands. Their buyers know what they're doing (Microcenter's flash memory products are both excellent and priced right), and nobody is going to bother making counterfeits of them due to a lack of broad market appeal.)
They are aiming this at someone with:
> a high discretionary budget for personal electronics and willingness to pay a premium for novel ideas.
But what are those novel ideas that would justify the “quite high” price?
And if I wanted a BSD-based desktop computer with “No AI. No Cloud. No Distractions”, I would just buy a Mac Mini, not log into an Apple ID, disable Siri, out it into Do Not Disturb. And Mac OS has never been a “walled garden”. So from a customer’s perspective, why wouldn’t this be an easier, cheaper, and superior solution?
From the post he links in the first sentence, about "how [he] decided to [...] mail SD cards to [his] customers"
index card + scotch tape
The easiest way to distribute these was to scotch tape the micro-SD to an index card and then write something about the content on the index card.
Of course, that's not an option for customers-facing stuff, but then you really don't want to be in the business of distributing micro-SD cards to customers!
Tip: If you fold over the index card and join the edges with Scotch tape it makes a handy little envelope to store a USB stick or SD card in - and you can add some written notes for contents, date, etc.
Never write an article promoting some solution, without discussing some alternative!
There are possible issues with gummy glue; it can be stubborn in adhering to cards. Getting stubborn piece of gummy glue off the back of a tiny Micro SD card could be not fun. You don't want to require the user to excessively handle the card or put mechanical any stress on it. They are thinner and more delicate than credit cards (and the bulk of those is just plastic. Only the chip and the magnetic stripe are sensitive). Some users could end up trying to use a MicroSD with a piece of the gummy glue on it.
I wouldn't want to put anything across the contacts of the SD card, which would mean that the adhesive would be on its back. But in that case, the contacts stick out of the page, inviting damage.
Imagine the user clumsily shaking the letter out of the envelope, such that it it fall out, opens, lands with the SD card down, and is immediately stepped on by their five-year-old.
If you put it on the paper contacts-down, you can tape over the back.
Since all this guy is actually selling is an SD card, he probably should get custom SD cards printed with his own logo on the SD card itself, packed in his own custom packaging. His marketing claim is that this is a premium product, so it needs premium-looking packaging. This is cheap from China. The setup fees are low.
(I once sold a boxed software product. $4000 for the first custom box, $0.25 thereafter, made in Silicon Valley. Visited the printing plant and went over the files with their prepress person, who had a Mac connected to an offset platemaking machine the size of a small car. She said "You want to see the press"? So I put in earplugs and went to look at the press, which was about a hundred feet long. It was turning out "museum quality" art prints at about three prints per second at the time. That shop did those as a sideline between box jobs.)
[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Camera-Sd-Card-Micro-...
[2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Custom-5G-Paper-SIM-C...
There are envelopes with bubble wrap lining. All the Chinese stores use them and I see them more often than cardboard boxes.
Plenty of scope to add your own branding
