Wireless LAN SD

I remember - or maybe am mis-remembering - that years ago, SD cards used to exist with wifi access. I'm not sure whether you could read the card remotely? Or the card presented itself as a card, but actually streamed your data? But I remember that they existed?

But the thing that struck me even more is that - again, I may be wrong - those cards actually ran Linux? They were super tiny computers?

In a sense, I find it incredible because - is there a parallel world where we'd all be using SD cards as micro computers, and would just have small docks with usb/ethernet? These could have competed with Pis, could be deployed as micro servers..?

Anyway, if someone has real actual information, I'd love to learn more!

Actually - this article [0] seems to imply that this whole micro-world is sorta dead? But wifi SD cards are real and exist? Do they run Linux...??

[0] https://www.mbreviews.com/best-wifi-sd-card/

Reminds me of the Eye-Fi SD cards [0] that would store photos taken with your camera and then allow you to wirelessly over your network download photos from the camera, and later would do geotagging based on visible wifi networks. 20 years ago it felt like the future.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye-Fi

I have one of these $2000 SD cards in my Diamond DA40. It lets me connect my iPad to my aircraft so I can transfer updated databases, flight plans, and see real time avionics data. It's pretty cool.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/155337/

I own a Ben NanoNote, at this point an ancient (2010) open-source, niche micro-laptop that ran a modification of OpenWrt. With a tiny keyboard and screen and all. It had no built-in anything, so the only way to get wireless connectivity on it was to buy one of these SDIO WLAN adapters. Had a lot of fun tinkering with that thing, maybe I should find it again...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_NanoNote

SDIO is still a fairly common interface that wifi and bluetooth adapters are connected with in embedded systems. Much lower idle power and protocol complexity than either USB or PCIe. You just don't find those wireless chipsets in an SD card form factor anymore. (and even if you did, SD card adapters don't generally support SDIO)

2023 thread that assessed things as not very good at the time:

* https://old.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/12ocr4u/the_wi...

A number of mirrorless cameras (from Sony, Canon, Nikon, etc) have built-in Wifi nowadays.

What I’ve always wished is that I could take pictures with a nice DLSR or bridge camera and have a way to quickly load the RAWs into my phone for culling and processing. You could get the best of both worlds, better sensors and lenses, and simple developing within seconds. I know there are cameras with built-in WiFi that do this but camera manufacturers seem to let their software become outdated quickly.

How old is that article? It doesn't have a date on it.

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