Which USB stick for resetting BomeBox on Mac?

After reconfiguring my network I lost my BomeBox (virtually) yesterday and it took several hours to get it back again. None of the reset-files worked, they simply did nothing. Maybe I used an incompatible USB stick.

  1. Can you recomment certain USB sticks which work on Mac and BomeBox?

  2. ExFAT-formatting the USB stick
    I am on a Mac mini M1 with macOS Sonoma 14.1.2 and the Disk Utility offers only ‘MS-DOS (FAT)’ and ‘ExFAT’, no FAT32. From the Web I learned that ExFAT is somewhat better than FAT32. Does it work with the BomeBox?

Hi, the instructions call out FAT Format no more than 16G.

I use FAT32 and it works fine. I’ve never tried FAT16 and I think when they say FAT, it means FAT32 as FAT16 is pretty uncommon these days.

Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care


Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz

and to add to that, the BomeBox should support all FAT flavors. Not so sure about ExFAT – afaik, it only increases the maximum capacity.

However, we have reports of seemingly random USB thumb drives that do not work with the BomeBox. It was not a specific brand or size. We could never find out the cause and all thumb drives we’ve tried here do work.
So in case of a problem, it’s usually easier to try a different thumb drive than to change the formatting. Cheap ones just cost a dollar or so.

To test without power cycling the BomeBox, load a MIDI Translator project file on the thumb drive (or just a random file renamed with file name extension .bmtp), and it should appear on the MIDI Translator web config page, in the list of available project files. When the USB thumb drive is plugged into the BomeBox, of course.

Well, the Mac offers only two formats: ‘MS-DOS (FAT)’ and ‘ExFAT’.
My stick has 16 GB as requested.

Thank you, Florian, for the test procedure. I tried with my only USB stick and the BomeBox apparently does not read it. The test file on the stick was not listed as a project in the web config page. Not even after power cycling. So I will buy the next sticks that come my way, try both formats that the Mac offers and report what happens.

You shouldn’t need to reformat any sticks you have. They usually come as FAT32. Just plug it into your Mac and try to put a reset file on it.

Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care


Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz