ReUse the Ancients

Here's your thingamajig:
https://www.electro-tech-online.com/attachments/picture0009-jpg.36067/

it's just a 256 MB Kodak SD card, but I don't wanna throw it away. Can it be turned into a simple USB pendrive without too much electronics? If no, I'm gonna break it in half.

There small SD card readers on the market, but 256 meg isn't much storage. There are libraries for most microcontrollers, for using them as external storage. Might hang on to it. Some people on E-bay seem a little dense, being that it's Kodak branded, you might make a few bucks listing it. Some people believe you have to use Kodak cards and batteries in their cameras, and might need one...

The Interface on those cards is SPI, so as Harvey said they'd work good for adding storage to a micro controller, but they're pretty much useless to connect to a PC unless you have an SD/MMC card slot in the machine, (getting more common nowdays) You could buy an SD card reader, but the reader is going to cost more than buying a USB thumb drive bigger than it.
Many printers nowdays have SD card readers built into them as well. So I wouldn't throw it out, but it's uses are limited.

Sceadwian said:

The Interface on those cards is SPI, so as Harvey said they'd work good for adding storage to a micro controller, but they're pretty much useless to connect to a PC unless you have an SD/MMC card slot in the machine

Click to expand...

Now that's interesting. How do I add memory to a, say, a PIC?

It uses the SPI bus Vizier, if your pic supports SPI you just set it up and you can read and write to any location on the flash chip you want. It needs to run at 3.3volts though so you either have to level adjust he logic signals to 3.3 volts or run the MCU at 3.3 volts. Managing the file system is a bit more complicated.

There's tons of example code out there for it. There's also several active threads in the forums right now, an LCD one that Atom is doing used an SD card interface, and at least one other is discussing it.

You can get an SD card reader for ~US$2 dealextreme.com

Sceadwian said:

There's tons of example code out there for it. There's also several active threads in the forums right now, an LCD one that Atom is doing used an SD card interface, and at least one other is discussing it.

Click to expand...

Cool stuff, Sceadwian. Of course, I'm not really into using that for PICs... not my cup of tea.