SD Card for Replicator

[Busybotz]

Sorry for the rehash of an old topic... 

The 2 gig SD card that came with my Replicator works perfectly. The various SD cards I have laying around do not work. Some will not read, some read and the the print stops in its tracks at 5%. All of the failed cards were re-formatted in W7 as FAT. 

Next I will try the SD card formatting program here:

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_3/ 

After that, I would like to buy another couple of SD cards. Can anyone provide a link to a card that just works without any hassles?

The latest card I tried is a SanDisk 1GB card, with the SD logo. On the back it says BB05176ASB Made in China. The best I can get from this card is a 5% print.

Thanks!

[Dan Newman]

On 25 May 2012 , at 3:13 PM, Busybotz wrote:

> Sorry for the rehash of an old topic...
>
> The 2 gig SD card that came with my Replicator works perfectly. The various
> SD cards I have laying around do not work. Some will not read, some read
> and the the print stops in its tracks at 5%. All of the failed cards were
> re-formatted in W7 as FAT.

But they need to be formatted FAT16.

Dan

[Shawn]

Don't know if this is it, but I found that I had to force the file
system of the card to be FAT16. FAT32 (which is the default FAT in most
cases these days), does not work quite right. The card must be 2GB at
most. Larger cards fail.

[Busybotz]

OK I admit to some lazy thinking. I just selected FAT with allocation unit size of 16 instead of FAT32, and felt that was sufficient. I also tried formatting in OS X with similar results.

How did you force FAT16?

I am trying the SDcard.org formatter, and will try a print later when my Replicator comes for air.

BTW the card I am trying to use is 1 gig.

[Dan Newman]

On 25 May 2012 , at 3:16 PM, Shawn wrote:

> Don't know if this is it, but I found that I had to force the file system of the card to be FAT16. FAT32 (which is the default FAT in most cases these days), does not work quite right. The card must be 2GB at most. Larger cards fail.

Actually, you can use a larger card, but (1) you still must format it FAT16,
and (2) in so doing you lose use of any space beyond 2GB on the card since
a FAT16 file system cannot make use of any space past 2GB. This is getting
to be a problem as 1 GB SD cards are already becoming scarce (unless you buy
them in bulk) and 2 GB SD cards are starting to follow suit.

Dan

[Shawn]

I use Ubuntu with the KDE desktop. The partition manager there
(Applications -> Utilities -> Partition Manager) includes a FAT16
option. From the command line you can try mkfs.msdos, though I've had
mixed results with that as I don't know if it is FAT16 or 32.

[Busybotz]

I may be in the minority here, but I do not have a linux box handy these days. I do have Ubuntu installed in Parallels under OS X, but that doesn't sound like a good solution.

From what I am reading the FAT format option in Windows7 is FAT16.

[Sean Tu]

Just a FYI, I've had problems writing to a SD on my Mac for the ToM. Not sure if it's the OS or the hardware since I have PC's to use and don't have to dual boot the Mac to solve my problem.

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[Mark Cohen]

Format as fat16
If it does not work then try formatting in another device

[Dan Newman]

Here's how to format FAT16 from OS X 10.5. Things may have changed since those days,

http://mtbaldy.us/~dnewman/lor/osx-sd-fat16.html

Regards,
Dan
On 25

[Clive Munday]

I have not tried it yet but will try this weekend. You should be able to format the cards with an Arduino and a shiled that has a reader / writer. I saw at least one site that offers the software to accomplish this.

 

https://bitbucket.org/johnmccombs/arduino-libraries/src/fb1d031725b8/SdFat/examples/SdFormatter/SdFormatter.pde

 

For cards I bought a whole load of micro SD cards with adapters all 2GB, these are working on my Arduino projects I have not treid on my TOM yet, another project for this weekend.

 

Best regards,

Clive 

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[Busybotz]

I used  https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_3/   to format the 1 gig Sandisk SD card. The Replicator locks up when I try to use it. 

[W. Craig Trader]

That is correct.  I used Windows 7 to format a spare 2GB SD Card.  I used FAT, 32KB sizes, and got a FAT16-formatted card, verified under Linux.  I wouldn't use the formatter from SDcard.org -- it doesn't appear to offer any FAT16 options.

Question:  what *speed* are your 'just lying around' SD cards?  You may be having a mismatch between what the Replicator card reader can handle and the SD cards themselves.  (I don't have a Replicator, so I can't measure the specs myself.)

- Craig -

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[Laird Popkin]

I've been having trouble getting my Replicator to recognize SD cards formatted by my Mac, but I got one approach to work: I used a new 2GB SanDisk SD card, formatted using Disk Utility with a single MS DOS (FAT) formatted partition. And the Replicator is working fine with it. Note that Disk Utility automatically (silently) uses FAT16 for SD volumes 2GB or less, and FAT32 for larger volumes - there is no FAT16 setting. The new card has been printing for 12 hours or so, no problems.

All of my previous attempts were with old 512 MB SD cards from years ago, trying command line formatting, Disk Utility, etc., and the Replicator hung as soon as I selected "Print from SD". Now I'm thinking that it was simply that the old cards that I had lying around were too old, and were electronically incompatible with the Replicator somehow, though  they worked in my Mac and two different cameras, so perhaps the Replicator is picky about what SD cards it will work with? It's hard to imaging, but could really old SD cards be too slow for the Arduino?

[Andrew Plumb]

Smaller cards sometimes get formatted as FAT12, which doesn't work.

Andrew.

On 2012-08-26, at 6:02 PM, Laird Popkin wrote:

I've been having trouble getting my Replicator to recognize SD cards formatted by my Mac, but I got one approach to work: I used a new 2GB SanDisk SD card, formatted using Disk Utility with a single MS DOS (FAT) formatted partition. And the Replicator is working fine with it. Note that Disk Utility automatically (silently) uses FAT16 for SD volumes 2GB or less, and FAT32 for larger volumes - there is no FAT16 setting. The new card has been printing for 12 hours or so, no problems.

All of my previous attempts were with old 512 MB SD cards from years ago, trying command line formatting, Disk Utility, etc., and the Replicator hung as soon as I selected "Print from SD". Now I'm thinking that it was simply that the old cards that I had lying around were too old, and were electronically incompatible with the Replicator somehow, though  they worked in my Mac and two different cameras, so perhaps the Replicator is picky about what SD cards it will work with? It's hard to imaging, but could really old SD cards be too slow for the Arduino?

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[Dan Newman]

% diskutil partitionDisk /Volumes/NO\ NAME MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT16" "MAKERBOT" 100M

In place of "NO\ NAME" use whatever name is presently showing for the SD card.

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[Dan Newman]

On 26 Aug 2012 , at 3:28 PM, Dan Newman wrote:

> % diskutil partitionDisk /Volumes/NO\ NAME MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT16" "MAKERBOT" 100M
>
> In place of "NO\ NAME" use whatever name is presently showing for the SD card.

P.S. The "100M" is largely ignored: diskutil ends up formatting the card for as large
as possible given the SD card's size and the FAT16 restriction. If it's a 2GB card,
it will format all 2GB and not just 100MB as suggested by the "100M".

Dan

[Dan Newman]

Sorry, I dropped the "1" parameter from the command when I copied it. Correct
command is

% diskutil partitionDisk /Volumes/NO\ NAME 1 MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT16" "MAKERBOT" 100M

Dan

[Owen M Collins]

Is that the syntax for Mac or Linux? I remember that there was a difference between 10.5 or 10.6

O.

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[Dan Newman]

On 26 Aug 2012 , at 4:18 PM, Owen M Collins wrote:

> Is that the syntax for Mac or Linux? I remember that there was a difference between 10.5 or 10.6

Mac OS X 10.5. YMMV with other versions of OS X. I cut and pasted that from notes I had made
about formatting the SD cards for a Light-o-Rama controller.

Dan

[Dan Newman]

On 6 Mar 2013 , at 2:09 AM, PH wrote:

>
> The SD card that came with my Makerbot started acting up, and I have had to
> reformat it a few times to get it going again.
> Today I had to give up on it, cannot get to it, does not show up at all on
> my computer.
> I tried a couple of my newer, larger, cards (sandisk extreme 16/32 Gb),
> command-line-formatting them to fat16, but the Replicator only gives me an
> "sd card read error" when I try to use them.

They are likely not SDSC and instead SDHC or SDXC. The library used by MBI
only handles SD (aka SDSC) and MMC. I've been meaning to enable SDHC support
in Sailfish but will not do so until after upcoming release (4.3 & 7.3). That
because the upcoming release has SD card CRC checking enabled so as to provide
automatic error detection and correction. I don't want to confound two
intertwined new features in the same release hence holding off on the SDHC
support (again for Sailfish). And since there were some users being hit by
SD card read errors, I figured the CRC support took precedence. (And, it
seems to have fixed their issues.)

Dan

[Patrick]

I had a similar issue.  I found out the only way I can format in FAT was to do what I found here: http://superuser.com/questions/202160/how-do-i-format-my-8-gig-usb-drive-to-fat-fat16-in-windows-7

Your larger cards probably won't work.  The 128MB card probably will because it is SDSC.

I also found out from MBI support to eliminate any dashes or spaces from file names and to keep them short.  This has worked for me so far.

On Wednesday, March 6, 2013 5:09:23 AM UTC-5, PH wrote:

The SD card that came with my Makerbot started acting up, and I have had to reformat it a few times to get it going again.

Today I had to give up on it, cannot get to it, does not show up at all on my computer.

I tried a couple of my newer, larger, cards (sandisk extreme 16/32 Gb), command-line-formatting them to fat16, but the Replicator only gives me an "sd card read error" when I try to use them.

I found an old 128Mb noname card which I'm now successfully using.

[Dan Newman]

On 8 Mar 2013 , at 10:08 AM, Patrick wrote:

> I had a similar issue. I found out the only way I can format in FAT was to
> do what I found
> here: http://superuser.com/questions/202160/how-do-i-format-my-8-gig-usb-drive-to-fat-fat16-in-windows-7
>
> Your larger cards probably won't work. The 128MB card probably will
> because it is SDSC.

Yes, MBI's firmware (for good reason) only supports SDSC, the original SD format.
To enable SDHC support requires an additional 10K of code space in the bot.
However, both MBI's firmware and Sailfish for that matter do not have quite
that much spare program space. (I believe that a lot of the additional code
space is eaten by 64bit support routines employed by the code generated by
avrgcc in handling the necessary 64bit file offsets and whatnot.)

We have successfully put CRC checking into Sailfish's SD card support across
all bots. I presently am testing additional FAT-32 and SDHC card support for
Gen 4 electronics with ATmega 2560's. (Twice the code space as on a Replicator.)

> I also found out from MBI support to eliminate any dashes or spaces from
> file names and to keep them short. This has worked for me so far.

That's because MBI has decided not to put in LCD display support code to show
file names longer than 19 characters. (The display is 20 wide, but they
use the first col for the selection pointer.) In Sailfish, we allow up to
the full 64 byte name permitted by FAT-16. Sailfish just auto-scrolls the
large file names like a ticker crawl on the bottom of the TV screen during
a news or sports case.

Dan

[Eighty]

Dan,

That reminds me of something I wanted to mention.  Would you mind considering slowing down the crawler a bit?  On my bot, the letters flash so much (as they crawl), I have a very difficult time making out the letters.  And sometimes it's just one digit that I'm looking for to differentiate which version it is.

Thanks! 

[Kobus du Toit]

I bought an 8GB card yesterday and formatted it with this https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

It is working fine for me