SC Card to USB bridge?

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Few customers pay the published prices. Incidentally, unless things changed, the business manager gets to write the front page of the datasheet with little engineering input. That might explain the awful verbiage in the chip description.

These readers are cheap enough to buy, open up, and inspect if you really want to know what s in them.

Reply to
miso

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You won't see anymore than a die-bonded chip. I bet they are masked- rom micro, around 10K code space. They can be less than $1 if you buy enough of them.

Reply to
linnix

Even 60% of the published prices don't get you from $10 (in reel quantities) down to a $1.79 packaged product, including shipping from China.

I wasn't much worried about the rhetoric. ;-) I just need the 20K' picture right now.

I planned to, if there was anything to be learned by opening one. I probably even have one around I could sacrifice. I just thought someone here may have done something similar.

Reply to
krw

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Having done this before, I could tell you exactly how to go about it, including the telephone numbers of the right people to call. But since you're such an asshole, I think I'll let you figure it out on your own.

I will give you a hint though: At 20K units, the only way to do it cheaply is to offshore it to China.

Reply to
mpm

On a sunny day (Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:17:47 -0600) it happened " snipped-for-privacy@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz" wrote in :

All you would likely find is a blob of epoxy or whetever it is covering the unknown chip.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:17:47 -0600) it happened " snipped-for-privacy@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz" wrote in :

If you have Linux you could perhaps type # lsusb Bus 003 Device 002: ID 046d:089d Logitech, Inc. Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 005 Device 003: ID 0bc2:3001 Seagate RSS LLC Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 001 Device 051: ID 046d:c00c Logitech, Inc. Optical Wheel Mouse Bus 001 Device 057: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port Bus 001 Device 002: ID 058f:9254 Alcor Micro Corp. Hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Shouls at least give you the device ID, typing that in google could give you the manufacturer and chip.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Since I'm pretty sure Keith is running Windows, one appropriate program to do this there is called, "USBView" --

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Interestingly someone ported it to Linux as well! --

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Reply to
Joel Koltner

My, aren't you the professional one. I hope you didn't stay up too many nights thinking about how to "get back" at me. After all, you need all the beauty sleep you can get.

I don't need "cheaply", yutz. We make money, not $1.79 (including shipping from China) widgets.

Reply to
krw

Thanks! That may be of use here at home, too. My system keeps losing the keyboard. ...and that Kensignton display adapter rarely works. :-(

Reply to
krw

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Well, you're not fooling me.

I've been watching your posts. About 70% of them ridicule others via namecalling and other such nonsense. You're even doing it right now, with the beauty sleep comment (you've never even met me) and asserting that all Chinese-made products are crap. "yutz" to use your terminology. You do it so often, you must not even notice. Pretty sad.

No doubt you'll disagree with everything I've said above, probably with some more namecalling to boot. Whoopee! Grow up. I just wanted to point out, that while I could help you, I am choosing not to.

Reply to
mpm

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Well, Mr. Pot. Welcome to the Usenet.

You are a yutz. Not my problem, or fault.

Indeed, you are proving to be a sad sack, in a technical thread, no less.

Your bile smells from here. That hate 'll kill ya.

Reply to
krw

Uggh... sorry to hear about the display adapter. On my wife's computer, she ends up having to reboot perhaps once a week to get it to "remember" it's connected, but she says she's still much happier with it than without.

Reply to
Joel Koltner

It did that for a while and then it came back when I reloaded the drivers. Now it's completely dead. USB View shows a yellow [!] next to it. I liked the thing but I don't see buying another if they're that unreliable.

Reply to
krw

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I think the Maxim chip is most than just a USB to SD reader. It may be more chip than you need.

If you really wanted to do us a favor, buy a few of these readers and benchmark them with the fastest SDHC chips you can get. I suspect there are readers and then there are readers, if you catch my drift. I had a MacSense reader, one of those Fry's specials for a few bucks. I gave it away to someone with a Mac, because it sure acted weird under win7. It needed to be pulled and reinserted often. The one I have now that works well is a SIIG JU-MR0412-S1m but you never know if it is pulling the data at max speed. These readers really seem slow when you are dumping 16Gbytes in a session.

Another idea comes to mind. Under linux and probably other OSs, you can sniff the USB to see a manufacturers identification. Sometimes you only see the interface chip, but it may provide a clue.You often see a whole class of products under different names that have the same chip in them. Prolific for usb to 232, C-Media for soundcards, etc. There may be a common memory card reader chip.

Reply to
miso

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Damn, you beat me to it. I just did a similar post. Linux is great for hardware probing. For windows, there is Everest

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Reply to
miso

le

We have built SD card readers into embedded PC-based products, using chips from these guys:

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They have a US sales office, who handle most of their English-language tech support (I'm in the UK).

They were surprisingly helpful, even for volumes in the low hundreds per year. MOQ was 250 pcs IIRC.

Like all these far-east manufacturers, they change their designs fairly regularly. Be prepared to do a lifetime buy for your project.

HTH

Reply to
news

That's entirely possible, though I don't see it yet. I've found some others that seem a lot more promising (and about $2.50) from SMSC (USB2640). The USB added hub fits what the boss wants to do perfectly.

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Yep. Thought about that. That's an important point, too. We're planning on using it for video. I suppose it doesn't necessarily need to run from there, but that's the idea.

I have a cheapie that I use for my digital camera (xD cards). It seems to be just as fast as the xD reader in my ThinkPad.

Yeah, Joel pointed me to some of these for Windows. I don't have a Linux system at work (not possible) and the one at home isn't working (Linux won't install) and I haven't spent any time on it.

Reply to
krw

Ouch. I don't speak Chinese. ;-)

This isn't going to be a biggie, I don't think, either. A normal product run for us is 1-10K units per year and this isn't a primary market.

That's going to be a killer. The product has already been sold for seven or eight years and I'm sure they don't want to change that. You bring up an excellent point though. This market will change fast, so don't expect any product to stay around long. I'll have to make the point, strongly, before we go forward.

Reply to
krw

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Most linux distributions have a "live" DVD. No installation needed. I know opensuse has the hardware sniffer built right into "yast", so there would be no other software to install.

Regarding speed, most "built in" readers don't sit on the PCI bus. Often they are just on an internal USB port, so there is no reason to believe a built-in reader would be faster than an external one.

I can tell you running Canon DPP from the compact flash versus hard drive is like night and day regading speed. If you were going to roll your own device, I'd certainly look at speed to give you something to market. I can't think of any product development cycle that doesn't start with benchmarking the competition. There is no way to judge where the product will fit in the market without knowing how it ranks. You don't necessarily have to be the best, but if the product is too "me too", you end up competing with the crap from China.

Reply to
miso

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