I Run a Surgical Skills Lab. A Raspberry Pi Storage Problem Led Me to Build Rekonify.

Wibonela — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:57:29 +0000

I run a Surgical Skills Lab where we train surgeons on everything from vascular procedures to laparoscopic techniques. It’s intense, detail-oriented work — and recording every training session is a critical part of how we teach.
Our setup uses laparoscopic cameras connected to Raspberry Pi boards for recording. Simple, affordable, effective. Until it isn’t.
The crash that kept happening
Here’s the thing about recording hours of surgical training video onto SD cards: you run out of space. Fast.
And when a Raspberry Pi runs out of storage mid-session, it doesn’t politely ask you to free up some room. It crashes. Hard.
So there I’d be, pulling the SD card out of the Pi, walking over to my Mac, plugging it in, and… nothing. macOS just stares at you. It can’t read EXT4 — the Linux filesystem that every Raspberry Pi uses by default.
The workaround rabbit hole
I spent more time than I’d like to admit searching for solutions. Most of what I found was Windows-based. I’d try those tools, and some would let me read the files — but actually deleting them to free up space? That was a different story. Half the time the tools would show the files but couldn’t fully remove them, leaving me right back where I started.
I tried macFUSE. It broke after a macOS update. I tried mounting through terminal hacks. Unreliable. I even considered keeping a cheap Linux laptop around just for this one task. It felt absurd.
For years, this was just one of those annoying problems I lived with. Every few weeks, a Pi would crash, I’d lose time fumbling with SD cards, and training sessions would get interrupted. Not exactly the workflow you want when you’re running a surgical lab.
Finally fixing it
I have a background in software development, and this problem had been nagging at me for long enough. When I started working with Claude Code, something clicked. I realized I could combine my own dev experience with AI-assisted coding to actually build the tool I’d been wishing existed.
The core idea was straightforward: use Apple’s own Virtualization.framework to spin up a tiny Linux VM — one that boots in under two seconds — to handle the EXT4 mounting natively. No kernel extensions. No fragile hacks. No security compromises. Just a clean, sandboxed solution that gives your Mac full read and write access to EXT4 drives.
I built it for myself first. It solved my problem completely. SD cards that used to require a 20-minute detour through workarounds were now drag-and-drop simple. Pop the card in, browse the files, delete what I don’t need, pop it back in the Pi. Done.
Why I decided to release it
After using it for a while, I had a thought: I can’t be the only one dealing with this.
Anyone who uses a Raspberry Pi with a Mac hits this wall. Embedded developers working with BeagleBone or Jetson Nano boards — same problem. People who dual-boot Linux and macOS. Anyone who needs to recover files from a Linux drive.
macOS has had zero native EXT4 support for its entire existence, and the third-party solutions are either outdated, require risky kernel extensions, or just don’t work reliably. So I polished what I’d built, gave it a proper interface, and put it on the Mac App Store.
That’s Rekonify.
What it actually does
You plug in an SD card or USB drive with an EXT4 filesystem. Rekonify detects it, boots a lightweight VM in under two seconds, and gives you a native Finder-like interface to browse, edit, and manage your files. Drag and drop works. File preview works. You can read, write, create, rename, and delete — all without ever touching a kernel extension or worrying about your system’s security.
It supports EXT2 and EXT3 too, runs natively on Apple Silicon, and takes up less than 50 MB.
The takeaway
Sometimes the best products come from solving your own problem for long enough that you finally snap and build the thing yourself. Rekonify wasn’t born in a startup brainstorm or a hackathon. It was born in a surgical training lab, out of frustration with a crashed Raspberry Pi and a Mac that refused to read its SD card.
If that sounds familiar, give it a try: rekonify.org

DEV Community: Wibonela

I Run a Surgical Skills Lab. A Raspberry Pi Storage Problem Led Me to Build Rekonify.