We’ve had to come up with our own in-house methods of mass production to handle some of the finer elements, such as preparing each of the SD cards for your kits. To copy a vast number of SD images we would have needed to invest in a professional SD card duplicator, but even a 1-31 machine can cost shy of £2,400, so we decided to use the humble Raspberry Pi and individual USB writers as a network, ending up with what appears to be a weeping willow SD card writer – which fit into the Naturebytes family quite well we thought.

The Naturebytes (accidental) weeping willow SD card writer

By using a terminal commander such as Terminator by Chris Jones we can easily network the Pi’s across a 16 port hub and use the standard Linux dd command to create 16 cards at a time at a fraction of the cost. As a small startup we didn’t have the funds to splash out on the expensive option, but it just goes to show how versatile the Pi can be – the green weeping SD card writers was luck. We had used them before as they support Linux on the fly, but the weeping willow effect brought a smile to our faces that we wanted to share with you.

We’ll be back again shortly and can’t wait to sign out the kits and get you all photographing wildlife and sharing what you’ve spotted.

Kind regards.

The Naturebytes Team