Add A Second SD Card To The Pi Zero

August 5, 2017 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

The Raspberry Pi Zero is a beautiful piece of hardware, fitting an entire Linux computer into a package the size of a pack of gum (don’t chew it, though). However, this size comes with limited IO options, which can be a complication for some projects. In this case, [Hugatry] wanted extra storage, and devised a smart method to add a second SD card to the Pi Zero.

The problem with the Pi Zero is that with only a single USB port, it’s difficult to add any other storage to the device without making things bulkier with hubs or other work arounds. Additionally, the main SD card can’t be removed while the Pi is running, so it makes sense to add an easy-to-use removable storage option to the Pi Zero.

It’s quite a simple hack – all that’s required to pull it off is a few resistors, an SD card connector, and some jumper wires. With everything hooked up, a small configuration change enables the operating system to recognise the new card.

Overall it’s great to see hacks that add further functionality to an already great platform. If you find it’s not powerful enough, you can always try overclocking one.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Secure Storage On SD Cards

May 8, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 109 Comments

Here’s a puzzler for you: how do you securely send data from one airgapped computer to another? Sending it over a network is right out, because that’s the entire point of an airgap. A sneakernet is inherently insecure, and you shouldn’t overestimate the security of a station wagon filled with tapes. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Nick Sayer] has a possible solution. It’s the Sankara Stones from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or a USB card reader that requires two cards. Either way, it’s an interesting experiment in physical security for data.

The idea behind the Orthrus, a secure RAID USB storage device for two SD cards, is to pair two SD cards. With both cards, you can read and write to this RAID drive without restriction. With only one, the data is irretrievable so they are safe during transit if shipped separately.

The design for this device is based around the ATXMega32A4U. It’s pretty much what you would expect from an ATMega, but this has a built-in full speed USB interface and hardware AES support. The USB is great for presenting two SD cards as a single drive, and the AES port is used to encrypt the data with a key that is stored in a key storage block on each card.

For the intended use case, it’s a good design. You can only get the data off of these SD cards if you have both of them. However, [Nick] is well aware of Schneier’s Law — anyone can design a cryptosystem that they themselves can’t break. That’s why he’s looking for volunteers to crack the Orthrus. It’s an interesting challenge, and one we’d love to see broken.

Recover Your Broken SD Card Selfies By Your Selfie

April 3, 2017 by Jack Laidlaw 33 Comments

You may still have some luck getting those selfies off of your SD card, even if it will no longer mount on your computer. [HDD Recovery Services] shows us a process to directly access the NAND memory of a faulty micro SD card to recover those precious files you thought about backing up but never got around to.

On a Micro SD card you may have noticed there are two slightly longer pins than the rest. These are VSS and VCC pins. As long as they are not a dead short between the two the SD card controller isn’t completely trashed and we can go ahead and get into that little sucker. With a bit of know how — along with sandpaper, enameled wire, and a NAND reader — an image of your lost data can be recovered with a bit of patience and some good soldering skills.

Working your way down from a relatively high grit sand paper, slowly sand away the plastic on the underside of the SD card until you can clearly see the copper traces hidden away inside. Then solder your enameled wire onto the small solder pads to hook it up to a NAND reader and you should be able to read the data that was previously unreachable via conventional means. Of course you’re still going to need to make sense out of the NAND dump. That’s a topic for a different article.

If you ever find yourself in need of an SD card recovery tool you could always roll your own DIY NAND reader. We will likely give this process a try just to play round with the concept. Hopefully we’ll never need to do SD card recovery!

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Roll Your Own 64GB SD Card From An EMMC Chip

November 18, 2016 by Jenny List 11 Comments

It’s well-known that buying Flash storage devices from cheap online retailers is fraught with danger. Stories abound of multi-gigabyte drives that turn out to be multi-megabyte ones engineered to falsely report their capacity. So when [Jason Gin] found a source of 64GB Toshiba eMMC chips for only $6 per device he bought a few, but was prepared for disappointment.

To test them, he decided to use an SD card interface. There are minor differences between eMMC and SD, but the interfaces are electrically the same and in most cases an SD controller will happily do business with an eMMC. It was not however an easy task to connect the two — these eMMCs were in BGA packages, hardly the easiest ones to work with. He resorted to dead-bug soldering the relevant interface wires to SD lines, and connecting up his computer.

His first attempt was something of a failure, wiring the chip to the PCB of a cheap USB-to-SD adaptor. This did not put him off though, he followed it up by cracking open a very old 2GB SD card that contained a PCB instead of being potted, and soldering his eMMC in place of its Flash and controller. This even fit in the original SD housing, and met with success when plugged into more reliable SD card readers. He was thus able to confirm the capacity of his chips.

His blog post is worth a read for more than just the very fine soldering involved. He takes us through some of the intricacies of SD interfacing, as well as talking at length about the decoupling and termination required to make a reliable connection. We particularly like his use of an area of unconnected BGA balls as prototyping space for decouplers.

If you marvel at the exceptional dexterity required for hand BGA work, we’ve a couple of other treats for you. There is this TI infra-red sensor BGA soldered to a piece of stripboard, and this wafer-level chip package soldered to an SOIC prototyping board.

Single Board Revolution: Preventing Flash Memory Corruption

August 3, 2016 by Moritz Walter 97 Comments

An SD card is surely not an enterprise grade storage solution, but single board computers also aren’t just toys anymore. You find them in applications far beyond the educational purpose they have emerged from, and the line between non-critical and critical applications keeps getting blurred.

Laundry notification hacks and arcade machines fail without causing harm. But how about electronic access control, or an automatic pet feeder? Would you rely on the data integrity of a plain micro SD card stuffed into a single board computer to keep your pet fed when you’re on vacation and you back in afterward? After all, SD card corruption is a well-discussed topic in the Raspberry Pi community. What can we do to keep our favorite single board computers from failing at random, and is there a better solution to the problem of storage than a stack of SD cards?

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Transcend Wifi SD Card Is A Tiny Linux Server

June 30, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 43 Comments

[jamesone111] bought a Transcend WifiSD card, presumably for photography, but it may just have been because he heard that they’re actually tiny Linux servers.

He read a post about these cards on the OpenWRT forums. They’re all a similar configuration of a relatively large amount of memory (compared to the usual embedded computer), a WiFi chip, and an ARM processor running a tiny Linux install. The card acts as a WiFi access point with a little server running on it, and waits for the user to connect to it via a website. It also has a mode where it will connect to up to three access points specified by the user, but it doesn’t actually have a way to tell the user what its IP address is; which is kind of funny.

[jamesone111] hacked around with the Transcend card for a bit. He found it pretty insecure, which as long as you’re not a naked celebrity, shouldn’t be a huge issue. For the hacker this is great as it opens up the chance of hacking the firmware for other uses.

Some have already pulled off some cool hacks with these cards. For example, [peterburk] hacked a similar card by PQI to turn his iPod into a portable file server.

Floppy Drive Hides SD Card Reader

February 28, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 23 Comments

[gilmour509] posted a thorough gallery of a new custom-built computer and case made to look like a 1995 IBM Aptiva. While the whole build is impressive, the most clever part involves a 3 1/2″ floppy disk that hides an SD card and works like a regular USB flash drive when inserted into the floppy drive.

He makes use of the fact that floppy disk edge card connectors have the same spacing as SD cards. Add in a hacked USB card reader, some careful cutting and assembly, and [gilmour509] has a very convincing floppy drive with gigabytes of space.

The best part is that with everything put together, the floppy disks and floppy drive look completely unmodified. He even made the file explorer icon show a floppy drive.

The faux-Aptiva gallery includes the full build, but skip to about 2/3 down to see the floppy SD card section.

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