> I began my research by looking for some kind of hard plastic case.
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!
Why not put them in a plastic bag or Electrostatic bag and then tape them to cardboard? That seems like it would solve most of the problems cheaply without adding a lot of thickness to the envelope?
I bought ten small microSD cards, 32 GB, for 3 EUR each. Very likely they're counterfeits. But they did come in a small plastic case. You could reuse these for mail. They also all come with an adapter. I have tons of these adapters, usually throw them away.
As for the article, it mentions:
> It is normally recommended to use bubble wrap to protect SD cards in transit, but I have never seen bubble wrap inside a normal envelope which made me suspect that this would elevate the rate of delivery failure.
Bubble wrap envelopes exist, obviously. The envelopes are a bit larger but would work. When I order small items from Ali, this is often the packaging they used.
I don't understand why they sell them as counterfeits. I just want 3 EUR cards, I'm not fussed about the size (they're for things that need a few MB, usually). However, nobody will sell me cheap cards, unless they're counterfeits that claim to be 32 GB but are actually 16 GB instead.
You can get “genuine no-name” cards at that sort of price, though I can't testify to the long-term reliability. Some that I have on use are https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09YGV2JGP/ which are £2.50 each if you get the 10x 16GB option. I got a 5-pack a larger version for a Thing a short while back and the ones I've used thus far fully checked out to support the claimed storage (I don't trust cheap SD cards without verifying, because of the counterfeit issue and quality issues, so ran a full test on each) and have so far maintained reasonable performance.
That is why there aren't genuine smaller cards: there just isn't a large market for them because the parts availability means the smaller capacity cards wouldn't work out any cheaper to source, so any noticeable drop in price would be through the seller reducing their markup. For the same price, people will buy the larger ones for the same price just-in-case they need more space later because why not? Even if there is a small price difference, if 8Gb or less is pennies cheaper than 16Gb or more, people will generally go for the larger option.
So to “why sell counterfeits?”: the scammy sellers can't sell them honestly in enough quantity to be worth bothering, so they lie.
This is not entirely on topic for this post, but I wish the website had even a brief paragraph about what this is, or more importantly what the vision is.
Even the initial “Q&A” post seems to assume some basic existing knowledge of the project.
At least have some selling point? I see that it is supposed to be distraction and bloat free, but what would the selling point be over say something like Linux?
I can't help but think that the idea is very pie-in-the-sky at this point, and the author is bike-shedding by thinking about how to deliver SD cards before having a product.
This is probably uncharitable. But it would be an explanation for the hand-wavy copy.
Yeah it is hard to imagine any person not willing to flash the SD themselves to try out an OS like this.
I can imagine building a hobby, niche unique OS and then other hobbyists installing it themselves, but not what OP is seemingly trying to do.
He is spending time trying to figure out how to send an microSD and all the regulations of selling an electronic device instead of simply building the OS. It seems quite backwards to me.
Based on the articles it seems like he has been spending months on this. I don't know... just build the OS and develop selling points...
The plan is to first figure out how to legally market, distribute, and sell this physical thing. It's more difficult than I imagined as you can read in my blog. Feedback from Hacker News has been invaluable to me during this process. I will replace the placeholder website as soon as I can start accepting payment.
It's a computer based on BSD, but with no WiFi, no BT, no screen, and no ability to play movies or games or music. And it's all programmed in C - not C++ or Rust anything similarly memory-safe-ish.
So RPi, but more vague and vulnerable and less useful. And maybe more expensive?
The oroduct description in the FAQ is entirely based on what it doesn’t or can’t do, but doesn’t say anything about what it will be able to do, except run an off-the-shelf window manager on an off-the-shelf OS. Are any apps going to be available, And how do customers install third-party apps without the dreaded Cloud?
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?
Which can’t play movies, music, or games; and doesn’t have WiFi or come with a monitor. But, it does have a GUI OS, so it’s intended to be connected to a display.
You can do it without tape if the correct sized corner or edge flaps are cut into the card stock. Think "apple sim tool unboxing card stock flaps". could cut some cool design also or note that professional vinyl cutting shops have expanded so they can print and cut same time on cardstock to make a cool card- super cheap and likely with near-on-demand turnaround
The whole project itself seems like "complicators gloves" to be honest...
Just buy something like a RasPi and be done with it (and it if even comes with WiFi and Bluetooth which you can disable).
You could even base it on the Compute Module 4, which can be bought in variants without the physical WiFi/BT hardware, if you don't trust the hardware overlay disabling the hardware.
Complicators gloves are a tongue-in-cheek reference to making problems for solutions instead of the other way around. The specific reference to the gloves, were from a, way back, article.
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.
These days, Deliveroo/JustEat cyclists have got a sort of big glove that attaches to the handlebars, kind of combining these ideas. Hands are warm when cycling (very important in the UK) but they don't have to remove the gloves to operate phones or open their bags and do the actual delivery.
Interesting, I appreciate the term drop, that may be what I’m looking for.
I’ve considered fabricating some sort of handlebar shields for my ATV when I need to be out in the winter when it’s raining (I work in agriculture in Eastern Oregon) because it seems that gloves that can handle both wind, cold and wet just don’t exist.
Often “waterproof” gloves simply aren’t or have a non-waterproof area on the back/wrist that gets soaked when rain flows down my vinyl (or pvc, I forget) jacket leaves.
What I currently use, extra large heavy duty kitchen gloves over smaller insulated gloves, with vinyl jacket sleeves going over the combination, tends to poorly retain heat in wind, especially while riding. An upside of just using a kitchen glove layer, is they are easy and cheap to have spares ready when they get muddy, or break.
Heated handlebars sounds nice actually, though that wouldn’t be a fully fix to the wind problem.
I’d also love see some sort of jacket made of shingled layers of vinyl that allows for breathability when it’s warmer but still wet in the spring. (Perhaps use some sort of spacing between shingles to foil capillary action)
Gor-Tex style jackets are worthless if you are sweating while it’s raining, may as well just use vinyl and get just as sweat soaked while having a cheaper jacket that lasts longer under damaging conditions.
Winter/rain gear seems intended for people in snow or just standing around.
these also exist for road bikes. I have them. You need all your cables to run under the tape for them to work. They're a lifesaver for winter training. You can wear normal cycling gloves to a way lower temperature. But you can only ride with your hands on the hoods, not the drops.
The opposite. Complicators gloves would be to use a solar powered fan to make electricity that drives a robot arm which uses a raspberry pi driving a computer vision controlled arm which is plucking individual boxes and folding them neatly into a waiting robot retrieval and delivery bot.
The "uncomplicator" responds with "just blow them off with a fan".
Be the uncomplictaor.
_edit_: actually I'm the 2nd degree complicator compared to crafish's reply, which is just "cut four rounded slots with an x-acto", no adhesive necessary.
2nd edit: two diagonal slots, one for each corner. Be the uncomplicator.
But only in addition to gloves right? You probably don’t need that on bikes because gloves are enough at the speed you normally ride a bike at. You only need heated grips on motorcycles because you are sometimes going very fast and gloves are too cold, right? I have never ridden a motorcycle but that’s what I imagine it’s like, correct me if I’m wrong.
I've never had a bike with heated grips, they seem a bit silly to me. When I ride in cold weather, I wear thick leather gloves that block a lot of the wind, I don't know how much heated grips would help through thick gloves. For super cold weather, I have a set of electrically heated gloves that do an excellent glove, they're marketed at snowmobile riders
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.
Author: Why must a physical SD card be mailed? Is it infeasible to provide a download link and instructions on how to use Rufus / dd / tool-of-choice to create the appropriately formatted card?
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.
The author is working on "a new type of personal computer. No AI. No cloud. No distractions. Just your thoughts."
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.
It's tricky because the kind of buyer I have in mind would feel uncomfortable with that operation despite having the best instructions. It would lead them to pass on this product at this stage thereby ruining my market validation.
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.
I think your starting assumption (that your target audience will be turned off by having to download an image and format an SD card but will not be turned off by plugging said SD card into an unenclosed dev board) is faulty, but I suppose your market validation test will suss that out.
I'd recommend including instructions in the email on how they can verify the SD card is loaded with the correct data. (e.g., `dd | sha256sum == curl | sha256sum`). This, I think would give you the best of both worlds. (Those are shell pipes (`|`) in my example.)
If you have the Out-of-Band communication channel to transmit your OTP (which has to have the same size as the data itself), you can just transmit the data using this method and skip the other channel.
True, but you might have a secure OOB channel for a limited time. In that case, you can transfer an arbitrarily large OTP over the secure channel, to be used later, in small pieces, when you do not have a secure channel available.
Signed checksums are generally sufficient to validate integrity. You could GPG encrypt / sign the entire payload as well if desired, though that requires recipients to have their own keys. Some 33 years after the introduction of PGP, this remains a significant stumbling block.
Payload sizes of an OS distribution and a GPG signature / checksum differ by six or more orders of magnitude.
The validation checks themselves can be readily publicly distributed. Though of course if desired, they can also be distributed with media, or in a separate postal mailing.
PKI leverages OOB comms such that a single OOB exchange can validate an entire further chain of messages.
I would ship the micro SD in a micro to full sized adaptor. You get protection and the customer gets an adapter if they don't already have one. Easier to apply the glue as well.
SD card mailers exist.[1] You can even get them custom-printed.
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.)
Looks like it's a similar standard by Huawei. [1] Very cool. I can see this being useful for tablets that have the SIM port but lack the cellular module. Wonder if this would ever make sense on an SBC.
Paper. Origami paper artists would know. Paper with cut slots. A paper folded in three. With cut slots. I am sure someone could make it. The same slots used to hold iphone sim tray pins.
I would just use masking tape. It's designed to come off surfaces without leaving a residue.
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.
There was a time when I carried some adapters with me so my laptop could read different card formats in the field.
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.
Kind of like mini-USB, which was briefly popular but quickly supplanted by micro-USB. I think my only surviving mini-USB device is a bike light battery.
My Happy Hacking Keyboard—which I bought comparatively recently, maybe 2017 or so—uses a mini-USB connector! Really solid piece of hardware, and I guess they just didn't see a need to update a design that worked.
Mini usb is actually more physically robust than the thinner microusb. I've never had a mini bend, but many micros. And it was much easier to get it right on first insert.
> It is normally recommended to use bubble wrap to protect SD cards in transit, but I have never seen bubble wrap inside a normal envelope which made me suspect that this would elevate the rate of delivery failure.
There are envelopes with bubble wrap lining. All the Chinese stores use them and I see them more often than cardboard boxes.
The impression I got from the article is that it's a bit thick and they thought it was flimsy based on the reviews (not saying they're right, but that was what they thought).
Someone once related a story from working in a 3M factory that made tape dispensers from bulk tape in the factory. The rolling machines to unroll the tape from the bulk rolls generated so much static electricity that walking through the aisle underneath would make your hair stand on end.
Why not put in a plastic ziploc bag? Lots of stuff from Amazon comes in plastic bags. I got a pack of 2x3" recently, that size would be perfect for this.
I bet it is enough not to move around in the envelope. I guess there are anti-static bags if paranoid.
its sometimes called booger glue or snot glue. Apple uses cut flaps to hold their sim tools without the need for chemical glue. same concept will work fine here. I buy all my sd cards directly from a manufacturers site, only from the manufacturer, such as samsung or westerndigital dot com, avoiding any affiliate or 3rd party vendors that can sneak onto sites like which do on the apple store. 0 fake cards this way
When i ship out collector / trading cards, common practice is to tape the card in between 2 slabs of cardboard to prevent bending (this ofcourse being inside of a sleeve / top loader plastic liner). Usually the protective case is taped to the cardboard with blue painter tape. It doesnt leave residue behind on the cardboard nor the plastic holder
I have bought ink-on-calfskin art and had it shipped to me, the artist wrapped it in parchment paper and taped the parchment envelope to the inside of a cardboard sandwich.
But for SD cards, I would expect affixing it to the inside of a cardboard sandwich with masking / painter's tape to be perfectly adequate, though not by any means pretty.
A person has to have the mental model of knowing they need to use this type of tool, know what specific tools exist, and how to operate the tool. If they're missing any one of those prerequisites, or they are not familiar with executing any part they will get lost. A lot of Windows software download websites have predatory fake download button ads. Smartphones have reduced the steps needed by centralizing software acquisition into app stores, hiding files and the file system, and obviating or automating housekeeping tasks like updates, anti-virus, restarts, and disk defragmentation.
When I bought a PowerMac 30 years ago it came with a manual. It assumed zero computer operating knowledge. That the mouse had to be slid across a mouse pad, and not pressed against the screen.
Do it like banks do. Put a full sized sheet of paper in the envelope with anything you need to say on it, with the SD card gummied to the appropriate position. It's very well tested and I've never had a problem with it.
> The plan is to permanently affix a thicker piece of paper somewhere on the letter with regular glue, and then use “gummy glue” to temporarily attach the microSD card on top of it.
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.
instead of dealing with folding and glue and such you could 3d print a custom case that was really thin, but had a wider "frame" around it that held it in place in the letter. Could fit a bunch on a single print bed, especially if you used those shorter width envelopes and got creative with the "frame" shape so that they were interleaved on the print bed.
Like the article said counterfeit items always worry me. I wish more companies sold directly to the end user.
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.
I guess you can just buy from a reputable electronics distributor such as Mouser or Digikey. They have to keep their supply chains clean due to having larger customers that would abandon them in a heartbeat if they did not.
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.
Until someone poisons the well by returning "unused" counterfeit cards to places like Digikey, anyway. It's dirty and rotten and illegal to convert fake cards into genuine cards like this, but criminals are gonna criminal.
(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.)
I'd be surprised if digikey didn't have checks in place to mitigate your concern, for the reasons in the above comment. Businesses would leave if they got a hint of chicanery.
Don't try to play games with customs in the mail. It's a terrible idea.
If you get caught, you and the person you're shipping to will both end up having your name flagged in the CBP database. You'll be scrutinized at the border for all future international travel.
You'll also both be ineligible for trusted traveler programs going forward. There are threads on Reddit where somebody bought an item online from overseas, the seller lied on the customs form, the USPS noticed and seized it... and the unwitting buyer had their Global Entry membership permanently revoked because it counted as a customs import violation.
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!