Setup new SD Card

Technical Support
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I need to get wifi enabled on first boot along with enabling ssh. There is a file wifi.txt in the extracted files and I assume I have to put my ssid and password to get it to enable wifi but no information on format. Also no information on enabling ssh.

My Shake 3D is in the basement with no connection other than wifi and it is very difficult to drag a keyboard and screen down there so it is essential that I be able to connect via wifi and ssh.

My 3D stopped transmitting on about 25 Feb. When trying to reboot and even “turn power off then on” it would not boot up again. I assume it is a bad SD card which has been in there and working for 2 1/2 years - it is a SanDisk Industrial 8GB. So I got a new SD card and had difficulty with #3 Unzip raspishake-release.zip, extracting the contents to the micro-SD card since I am on Linux Mint and there was no GUI to do that. Finally just copied the zip to the SD card, extracted it which went to a folder, copied to contents of the folder up one level and am now stuck since I need to get ssh and wifi enabled somehow.
And yes, I looked at “Your topic is similar to…”

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Hello LRBinMT, and welcome back to the community.

To ensure that the Shake OS is properly burned on the microSD card, you could install a GUI such as BalenaEtcher (balenaEtcher - Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives) for Linux and then follow the Alternative Burning Method from line 35 onwards on this file: raspishake-microSD-card-software-Instructions.txt · main · raspberryShake-public / Raspshake Sd Img · GitLab

I think you may also be able to use the USB Image Writer that is on Linux Mint (Applications > System Tools > USB Image Writer), or, via command line, you should be able to use unzip raspishake-release.zip -d <microsdcard>.

Once the microSD card is ready, you can then turn on the Shake for the first time, and you’ll have to wait until the image unpacking task (fully automated) has finished. It should take between 10 and 20 minutes, as described in the software instruction text file above.

Once done, SSH will be enabled by default, and the easiest way to set up your WiFi (guide here: How to configure Wifi and USB wifi dongles from command-line) is to directly connect your Shake to a PC/Laptop (guide here: How to access your Raspberry Shake’s computer via ssh) and then check/edit the interfaces and wpa_supplicant.conf files.

Once done, you can reboot the Shake, disconnect it from your PC/Laptop, and you should have a connection to your local WiFi once it has restarted.

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Thank you, was able to get it up and running.

However, it would be nice if you could setup the software so one could get the WiFi credentials and/or kill the Raspberry Pi WiFi by setting up a text file on the SD card. It appeared to me the wifi.txt was going to do at least part of that. It was a pain to get a laptop that had an Ethernet port, go into the basement, hook up (by the way eth0 didn’t work, this particular laptop labeled the Ethernet port enp0s25) and setup the WiFi credentials and kill the Pi WiFi.

Is 2 1/2 years for an SD average or short on the life span of a SD card in a Shake?

I did not have to do anything to the zip file other than what I said I did, copy zip to SD card, Unzip it, copy files from the unzip created folders up one directory level.

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Hello LRBinMT,

It’s great to hear that everything is working fine now, and thank you so much for your feedback on the WiFi configuration option. Indeed, a pre-WiFi setup before the unpacking phase could become useful in similar cases.

I will ask our software team to take your suggestion into account for our future Shake OS releases.

Is 2 1/2 years for an SD average or short on the life span of an SD card in a Shake?

Lifespan of an SD card can depend on multiple different factors, such as the number of power cycles, continued appropriate power supply or not, read/write cycle limits, and more. That said, 2.5 years is indeed a good lifespan for your card. I have one Shake that is 3.5 years going (attached to an UPS) and it’s still working with the same microSD since the start.