• mbirth@lemmy.mbirth.uk
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    6 months ago

    It’s a shame these never took off. I’d love for my various USB drives to have displays that show their labels and maybe even contents.

    • Deebster@programming.dev
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      6 months ago

      I used to have some with e-ink displays that showed how full they were, but I always wished I could use them to show a label instead.

    • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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      6 months ago

      That’d make it highly file system dependent with no way of updating the firmware. All these drives stopped working after the FAT32->ExFAT switch.

      • mbirth@lemmy.mbirth.uk
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        6 months ago

        What makes you think there’s no way of updating the firmware? Also, they could be made so that there’s a simple API (like a serial device exposed via USB) and apps for Win/macOS/Linux to update the label. But I guess the demand was never there.

        • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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          6 months ago

          What makes you think there’s no way of updating the firmware?

          I don’t know, but the amount of USB drives I’ve seen with a readily identifiable serial or jtag port and API documentation is exactly zero. 😉

          I think most of them were one-and-done, as in, code/hardware was designed once, and never iterated on again, at least not for devices already in the field.

      • ares35@kbin.social
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        6 months ago

        those were so long ago they’re small enough that windows would still be able to format them fat32 even with its built-in limitations on formatting that filesystem.

        what would be completely useless is scrolling through a larger flash drive’ or card’s files, one or two at a time.