Making Use Of The Trancend WiFi SD Card

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[CNLohr] spends most of his time on the Internet, but sometimes real life drags him away from his keyboard. These “vacations”, as he calls them, don’t have a good Internet connection and forces him to rely on flaky cell phone connections that go up and down at the drop of a hat. Figuring this would be a great opportunity for some hardware hacking, [CNLohr] came up with an ‘Internet-o-mometer’ – a device powered by a Trancend WiFi SD card that uses an 8×8 LED display to show the current status of his phone’s Internet connection.

This build uses the Trancend WiFi SD card motherboard we’ve seen before. When the card boots, it tries to connect to his phone’s WiFi connection.  When it connects, a green smiley face is displayed on the LED matrix. When a whole lot of files are downloaded or, more specifically, the ping to google.com is more than 4 seconds, a red frowny face indicates the Internet connection is down.

In other Trancend WiFi SD card news, a whole lot of people including [Dan Krause] (thanks for the tip) have been working on a complete replacement OS for these neat little cards. Right now the OS is in very rough shape, but there is a pre-built system available should anyone want to experiment. [CNLohr] is also working on a compact, double-sided version of his SD card motherboard and we’ll be happy to feature a link to his Tindie store when he sends that in.

14 thoughts on “Making Use Of The Trancend WiFi SD Card

  1. “[CNLohr] spends most of his time on the Internet, but sometimes real life drags him away from his keyboard.”

    OK, I’ve read enough. Gonna go read something that isn’t so scary.

  2. I want to know what the rest of the article says! Its like they were in the middle of a thought process, got interrupted, thought they were done and proceeded to add the last little bit at the end.

  3. Whatever the largest storage capacity of these are, I want one, want it with a standard SDIO interface.

    Why? Because with Dmitry Grinberg’s SDHC and FAT32 drivers for Palm OS, with one of these cards a Palm Tungsten E2 would be a very nice shirt pocket mobile DJ system for a lot less money and a much longer battery life playing music than any smartphone.

    The stock E2 battery could run playing music for over 12 hours. Swap it for a higher capacity one that’s the same physical size and it’ll go even longer. No smartphone or tablet currently made can do that.

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