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I own a small industrial automation business (Europe). Enshittification is reaching to us as well. We recently signed a contract to supporting a business of using new piece of automation hardware that can only store its state on SD cards. The hardware is VERY proprietary and exposes no APIs. SD card writes ain't handled properly and files often get corrupted after power outages. My operators are diving around to clone SD cards and replace them all day. This is maddening. Contract is very attractive for the company so I would like to solve this on our own. We did our best to reach out to the manufacturer and they plainly deny any wrongdoing and refuse to fix their bugs (we are too small company to care).
So after a quick brainstorming with my engineering team, we discovered these wifi-enabled SD card products. They are all positioned at the photographer market segment and wifi interface is only accessible when manipulating files directly. We want to spin up our own product that would enable remote wireless upload of files on SD card. This way we can use git of controller's state, remotely update controller even without APIs and so on.
We don't need it to be compact and fit into sd card slot. My engineer is working on ESP32 based solutions where we use a MUX to switch SD between the controller and ESP. This unfortunately disconnects SD from controller and raises alarm, which is a problem. We know how to disable the alarm, but I would prefer we don't.
I'm sure HN can recommend a better existing product or better architecture to develop.
Thanks!