SD cards & the much smaller microSD cards are found on many devices, with the card often accessible from outside the enclosure. Unfortunately there’s a solid chance that especially small microSD cards will find their way past the microSD card reader slot and into the enclosure. This is what happened to [Rob] of the SevenFortyOne Radios and Repairs channel on YouTube with a NanoVNA unit. While shaking the unit, you can clearly hear the microSD card rattling inside, courtesy of the rather large gap above the card slot.
After a quick teardown and extracting the lost microSD card, the solution to prevent this is a simple bit of foam stuck on top of the microSD card slot, so that the too large opening in the enclosure is now fully blocked. It’s clearly a bit of a design fail in this particular NanoVNA unit, worsened by the tiny size of the card and having to use a fingernail to push the card into the slot as it’s so far inside the enclosure.
While [Rob] seems to blame himself for this event, we’d chalk it mostly up to poor design. It’s an issue that’s seen with certain SBC enclosures and various gadgets too, where losing a microSD card is pretty much a matter of time, and hugely fiddly at the best of times. That said, what is your preferred way of handling microSD card insertion & removal in devices like these?
I pay someone to insert and remove the microSD card, just like paying someone to replace a light bulb. lol
A genuine hack!
And this is an even bigger problem on the HackRF Portapack (well, at least some flavor of them). I think I will borrow this one.
Almost the exact same thing!
One of the microSD socket designs is a push/pull insert that’s slightly raised up from the board. Putting the SD card in blindly from above is awkward because it’s hard to get it in with that slight “off the board” height.
3d print a slight shim, and it slides right in.
Many years ago (I was doing IT support at the time) I reduced one of our staffers to literal tears laughing with a similar situation.
She called our office, frantic, having absentmindedly stuck a mini-cd disk into the optical drive slot of her iMac G5. I went to their office, calmly unplugged everything, picked it up, rotated it 90 degrees so the slot faced downward and gave it a vigorous couple of shakes, whereupon it fell out.
Honestly I really expected it wouldn’t work, and I’d have to take it back to out office and disassemble it to get it out, but I somehow managed to keep a straight face as I said “There you go!” and set it up back on her desk.
It’s happened on my Ender 3 printer as well 🤦🏼♂️
It threatened to happen on our Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro, so we got one of those flat-cable extenders. The socket on the far end of the extender is pretty much foolproof, and we never fully remove the printer end. We have to partially remove the machine end to let the machine know we’ve inserted a new SD, but it doesn’t have to come all the way out.
I really wish they had just used a full-size SD socket. Micro-SD adapters are cheap, plentiful, and pretty much foolproof.
Same problem with lilygo t-embed cc1101. Very nifty fix! Thanks for the tip. now how do I keep it from rocketing across the room?