Writing SD Cards: Mac OS X

Apple provides a copy of dd with recent releases of OS X (at least since 10.7, probably earlier).

Finding the SD card descriptor:

1. Insert the SD card
2. In a terminal run diskutil list. Look for the SD card in the list of disks. On a MacBook with a singe hard drive, the output is:

      #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
      0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
      1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
      2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.2 GB   disk0s2
      3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   /dev/disk1
      #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
      0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *2.0 GB     disk1
      1:                 DOS_FAT_32 WARP SD                 32.0 MB    disk1s1
   

3. In this example, the SD card device descriptor is /dev/disk1. The actual descriptor will differ on other machines with different disk configurations, but should take the form /dev/diskX.

Copying the .bin file:

1. Unmount (not eject) the drive using this command (replacing X with your actual SD descriptor):

   diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX
   

2. Run this command, replacing the last three arguments with the correct values:

   dd bs=512 seek=<N> if=<yourFile.bin> of=</dev/diskX>
   

   1. <N>: depends on the target slot number; use (131072 + slotNum*32768). More details here.
   2. <yourFile.bin>: the binary FPGA configuration file
   3. </dev/diskX>: device descriptor for the SD card
3. If successful, dd should report the following (the time/throughput values will differ):

   18032+1 records in
   18032+1 records out
   9232444 bytes transferred in 8.503631 secs (1085706 bytes/sec)
   

4. Repeat for additional .bin config files in additional slots if needed.
5. Eject the SD card in the Finder (if it's mounted).