Duplication of TX-1696

With TX-1696 finished and only some minor adjustments needed, its time to think about publishing the game that has taken us nearly 3 years to create. With that in mind the first step is to see about duplicating SD cards in bulk as we have over 350 pre-orders and that would need a lot of swapping of SD cards.

One solution would be to buy an SD card duplicating machine like the EZ DUPE SOHO Touch 1 to 10 SD Duplicator from amazon at £699.00 to make 10 copies making it £2.00 a copy just for the duplication and that’s without the price of the SD cards

The test

I believe that its just a matter of writing a multi-threading application to write the data to the SD cards synchronously, this could probably be written in C#, so I could use windows forms, but before I embark on yet another programming project, I thought I would check to see if someone has written one already. Luckily, they have, it’s called Disk Imager.

https://github.com/RomanBelkov/DiskImager/wiki

This small application lets you make back up images of your SD card, and then lets you write that image to multiple SD card or USB sticks.

Hardware

I purchased a powered USB hub by Vemont with 7 ports so I could write seven SD cards at once, I also purchased Beikell High-speed SD/Micro SD Card Readers from amazon at a total cost £52.61, in hindsight I may have been able to buy cheaper SD readers as my old one worked just as fast.  

I made an image of the SD card and wrote 6 copies from it in under 6 minutes, some were done much faster, however for some reason some of the SD cards took much longer to write than others so I will call it 6 minutes. This would mean that it will take roughly 5-6 hours to make 350 SD cards at just £0.14p, this lower cost for duplication is not bad at all.

Next time we think about boxes and inserts!