Wire-free miniscope SD card issue

[Clément Pouget]

Hello,

I am currently trying to setup the wire-free miniscope and am running into issues with the SD card. We have bought the one that's pre-modified from your website, however we seem to have issues.

First of all, I cannot access the SD card from miniscopesdcardreader software: it's throwing the "Write key in header (...) does not match defined WRITE_KEY". I decided to download HxD to check out said write key.

There, I can find the SD card under two names : "Untitled (I:)" under Logical disks, and "Removeable disk 1" under Physical disks.

When I open the physical disk version of it, i can see that the write key is indeed correctly written to sector 1023, so my guess is the miniscopecardreader is not looking in the right place. I then edited the logical disk version of the SD card: there, sector 1023 was not the write key so I changed it. After doing so, I can modify the settings in the software. Let's say i modify recording time to 20 seconds.

 I then take out the SD card and try to record with the miniscope. It does record, but only for a few seconds. When I plug the SD card back in, I can read the few seconds of recording but once that's done, any other attempt to write/read anything throws the "Write key in header (...) does not match defined WRITE_KEY" error. Once that has happened, I cannot modify the SD card anymore in HxD ("insufficient rights for opening this disk, even as administrator').

My guess is that for some reason,  the software is not looking for the write key in the right place, so I have to modify a sector that, when recording with the miniscope, somehow gets overwritten, and then I can't do anything with it anymore ?

If you have any ideas on troubleshooting/sloving steps, I'm all up for it. In the meantime i'll try and get my hands on a new SD card, see if that changes anything.

Thanks for the help, and for making all this available :)

Clément Pouget

P.S: I have tried full format of the SD card and following the same steps again, to no avail.

[Daniel Aharoni]

Hello,

The Miniscope Project and my lab do not directly sell anything ourselves. Can you tell me where you purchases these components from?

From the sound of it, the MiniscopeDFCardReader is attempting to access the incorrect disk drive location. I am pretty sure you need to use the Physical disk name and not the logical disk name for everything to work properly. Depending on your version of Windows, you might need to slightly modify the "Drive:" entry in the software. If the WRITE_KEY is located in the 1023 section correctly, once you have the correct physics "Drive" name it shouldn't throw an error any more.