Micro SD cards are too small to label. It’s a problem.
I have a handful of cards here, and if I haven’t put them back into the correct case, I can only tell what’s on them by slotting them into a device. In most cases they are Linux images, and it’s not clear what they are by looking at the card itself.
My workshop has a parts bin that is filled with different flavours of single board computers, mostly Raspberry Pi and Arduino. What started out for me as hobby boards to tinker with, has now become a stock item that I grab off the shelf to serve a purpose. At work, if I need a workhorse PC to handle a task, I’ll spin up a virtual machine. At home I’ll flash an image to an SD card and boot it into a Raspberry Pi.
They handle different tasks in different places, and they are fairly forgiving. They can tolerate semi harsh environments – like a basement, workshop or shed – so they are suitable for handling compute tasks in the plant room, workshop or home office.
Looking on my network on an IP scanner, I can see a handful of RPi, some I had even forgotten were there.
I can see OctoPrint, managing jobs for the 3D printer and interfacing between web browsers through the house or instances of Cura. There’s a PiHole silently killing adverts across the network and keeping score. Another is a web server that I used to as a jumping in point for remote sessions – I should probably work harden or retire that one.
I can see a Retro Pi game emulator filled with thousands of arcade and console games.
There’s a Kodi build running as a media server and streaming box for dumb screens.
I keep a couple of dormant Pis in the workshop in case I need to come up with a solution for a problem, or if I need to spin up a new desktop PC for something. This is true ‘appliance computing’ for me now. I don’t have to configure anything after I set up the software that writes the card, because I was able to pre-bake all the configuration settings into every image. WiFi, screen size, user accounts are all present when I first boot the image, so I can select an image, build the card and have the computer running in minutes.
The only difficulty comes from identifying what’s on the SD cards.