[zkirill]

It's tricky because the kind of buyer I have in mind would feel uncomfortable with that operation despite having the best instructions. It would lead them to pass on this product at this stage thereby ruining my market validation.

I want to make the experience as seamless as possible given the constraints, and popping the SD card in the slot is the best I came up with so far.

Having said that, the comment by tjohns below made me rethink some things. I may end up providing both the download link, and also mail the SD card.

> Mailing SD cards in their final form in a regular envelope is not secure. An adversary could intercept and reformat, and it'd be tough to tell. I realize this is unlikely, but still, I'm like.. why?

I agree. It's a poor medium for many different reasons. However, if I can sell these, then I can sunset them and start working on the actual electronic device, which will house the OS and software on eMMC or SSD.

[petsfed]

I think your starting assumption (that your target audience will be turned off by having to download an image and format an SD card but will not be turned off by plugging said SD card into an unenclosed dev board) is faulty, but I suppose your market validation test will suss that out.

[jmholla]

I'd recommend including instructions in the email on how they can verify the SD card is loaded with the correct data. (e.g., `dd | sha256sum == curl | sha256sum`). This, I think would give you the best of both worlds. (Those are shell pipes (`|`) in my example.)