FATxx on a Compact Flash

Mar 30, 2007 3 Replies
T

A customer is contemplating a product with a compact flash card to archive product data. The product will probably need to talk to a PC, and I have no burning need to reinvent the wheel.



I dimly remember an article in Circuit Cellar that showed a CF card being accessed via SPI, and using a FAT12 or FAT16 file system.



Has anyone had any recent experience with making this sort of thing work? Any good libraries out there to use? Anybody remember which issue of Circuit Cellar it was that showed how to do it?



This is going into a PIC, but it's a PIC18, and we're going to be using the one with either 32 or 64k words of ROM, so we'll have some room to play with.


Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com
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M

I'm doing this right now using (my modified version of) Lewin's DOSFS and bit-banged SPI handlers on the i8096 for an MMC card; I will post a link to the code when it's done. Are you sure it was a CF card that you saw in the article, over SPI? If so, do you remember if Ciarcia built a custom controller for it?

Regards,

Michael

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N

Micrium has uC/FS embedded file system that will do what you want. Not free, but easy to use.

Scott Validated Software Corp.
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T

Now that you mention it, no, I'm not sure if it was specifically CF or just one of them thar little memory cards -- I haven't had occasion to do one of these ever, so I've been happily ignorant of what's out there.

I was also looking at Lewin's file system, so I'll be interested to hear how it is working for you.

-- and it wasn't Ciarcia; his name isn't on the by-line of many articles in the magazine these days.

Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com Posting from Google? See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/ Do you need to implement control loops in software? "Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" gives you just what it says. See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html
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