SD

The card slot accepts standard size SD and SDHC cards. The SdFat library (used in the freebird) does not support SDXC. All cards larger than 32GB are SDXC, and there are also small, high performance SDXC cards, none of which will work.

If you're only sampling conductivity, any card brand will be fine. If you want to sample the IMU (heading/pitch/roll), the datastream is 10x bigger, and it's worth it to buy a SanDisk brand card. Compared to using SD cards in a computer or camera, the freebird logger has little RAM and relies on the SD card itself to handle some buffering. Higher quality cards will work better as they tend to have more internal buffering and better write algorithms.

Formatting the card is best done by the freebird itself. To format an SD card:

1. insert card into the slot until it clicks.
2. connect power, and there should be a quick beep-beep
3. connect microUSB to a PC USB port
4. open a serial terminal
5. type 'info' just to make sure it's alive
6. type 'format'
7. It will prompt you to type 'yes'
8. a few seconds later and the card is good to go, with the volume label "FREEBIRD"

Once it's formatted, you can write files to it from a PC, though avoid filenames longer than the old DOS 8.3 rule.