Now, how to get the SD card in the hands of the customer? Mail it to them!
I worked on a equipment project for a large restaurant chain about a decade ago. The core application and related assets/recipes/files were all on an SD card. When it was time to upgrade the app or release new seasonal recipes, every store got a new SD card in the mail with instructions to wait for a certain date, power down, swap cards, power back on, dispose of the old card.
It was way cheaper to send updates that way than bother with encryption, networking, corrupted disks, etc. A bricked machine lost a hundred dollars or more per hour. If the new card failed, the operator could continue with the old one until a replacement could be sent.
One major problem was suppliers always trying to swap to lower cost SD cards, even counterfeit ones (c.f. Bunnie), and things would go south really fast. The Linux system and hardware were both pretty old and had MMC stack issues when the cards showed shaky margins on the timing. Or, capacity wasn't what was advertised (c.f Bunnie). We had to spend a cycle or two qualifying each mailing release to make sure a shitty batch of cards didn't make its way into the stream.
SD has its uses, although I still prefer a read-only eMMC partition to hold the bootloader and O/S. I don't get why RPi users put themselves through such misery to save $20 on their SBC.
Glad to hear that this passed muster in the food industry. Do you by any chance remember how the SD card was packaged or protected from damage while in transport?
Comments
Now, how to get the SD card in the hands of the customer? Mail it to them!
I worked on a equipment project for a large restaurant chain about a decade ago. The core application and related assets/recipes/files were all on an SD card. When it was time to upgrade the app or release new seasonal recipes, every store got a new SD card in the mail with instructions to wait for a certain date, power down, swap cards, power back on, dispose of the old card.
It was way cheaper to send updates that way than bother with encryption, networking, corrupted disks, etc. A bricked machine lost a hundred dollars or more per hour. If the new card failed, the operator could continue with the old one until a replacement could be sent.
One major problem was suppliers always trying to swap to lower cost SD cards, even counterfeit ones (c.f. Bunnie), and things would go south really fast. The Linux system and hardware were both pretty old and had MMC stack issues when the cards showed shaky margins on the timing. Or, capacity wasn't what was advertised (c.f Bunnie). We had to spend a cycle or two qualifying each mailing release to make sure a shitty batch of cards didn't make its way into the stream.
SD has its uses, although I still prefer a read-only eMMC partition to hold the bootloader and O/S. I don't get why RPi users put themselves through such misery to save $20 on their SBC.
Glad to hear that this passed muster in the food industry. Do you by any chance remember how the SD card was packaged or protected from damage while in transport?
They're pretty durable. It can survive in a padded envelope just fine. I've had them in the pockets of my jeans after a washing machine cycle.