SD cards are tricky beasts. I have spent the last few days trying to get better reliability out of my polargraph machines. I found a bunch of new SD cards that just wouldn’t initialise. Then I tidied up the software init routines, and some sprang into life! Hurray!
There is a new PolargraphSD firmware available in the github repo, and I’ve also rebundled it into a zip using the new releases feature in Github:
The design of the Polarshield, and the interaction between it, the arduino underneath and the SD card reader on top, the USB port and the power supply is clearly dysfunctional. Some combinations are trickier than others, it isn’t at all clear to me why.
The takeaway is hopefully that a couple of SD cards that previously did not work, now do. Please have a go with this, and let me know.
Hi Sandy… just uploaded the newest polarshield code (1.7.25) but I still can not get the polarshield to recognize a ScanDisk 512MB SD card??? Any suggestions.
Tom
Tom, I can’t find much rhyme or reason to say which ones work and which don’t… But many seem to initialise under USB power, but not under proper power (external PSU). Bizarrely, if you let it initialise just like that, and then plug the PSU in second, it seems to work ok. Infuriating. I’ll send you out one of the SD cards I’m using now though, fingers crossed that’ll work.
Hi everyone, I noticed than sometimes my Polargraph won’t recognize my SD card when I reboot using the reset button, but it seems to work better when I unplug the power cable, wait a few seconds and plug it again… hope this can help!