FSRWfemto help!!! Anybody who knows how to work it, please share.

Ravenkallen

Okay, so i have finally gotten around to playing a little more with sd cards. I modified the SD trainer program(It is powered by FSRWfemto)·so i could test out various functions(Reading single characters, writing single characters, using arrays...ect).... My only few problems so far are, ·1. Can the SD card read and write words/ Longs?, 2. If you are reading a whole file larger than 32 Kilobytes do you need any knowledge of clusters or stuff like that?, 3. How hard is it to boot the prop up from a SD card?..... Thanks again for all the previous help. The people on this forum are as friendly as they are knowledgeable and that is very unusual...

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet

Mike Green

There is no separate routine for words or longs. They're all treated as sequences of bytes and the address of the first byte is what's passed to the routines along with a byte count (2 for words, 4 for longs). "pread" and "pwrite" are the routines. The routines take care of clusters and cluster boundaries.

Booting from an SD card is a little harder. Kye's routines have a boot method and FemtoBasic's fsrwFemto/sdspiFemto has a boot routine where you have to mount the card first, open the file you want, then call bootSDCard to boot the opened file. The file must be contiguous in the 1st 32K for this to work. The easiest way to insure this is to format the SD card with 32K clusters.

Cluso99

There are a number of bootloaders, including the one posted today. The simplest in EEPROM is on the RamBlade thread. It only knows about the SD hardware and will boot a file from the SD. There is no need to ever change the code in EEPROM as the running program will be located on the SD. There is a sequence and it will load any OS, such as PropDos, PropCmd, Sphinx, Kyes OS, etc. It is fully descrived in the RamBlade thread.

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Links to other interesting threads:

· Home of the MultiBladeProps: TriBlade,·RamBlade,·SixBlade, website
· Single Board Computer:·3 Propeller ICs·and a·TriBladeProp board (ZiCog Z80 Emulator)
· Prop Tools under Development or Completed (Index)
· Emulators: CPUs Z80 etc; Micros Altair etc;· Terminals·VT100 etc; (Index) ZiCog (Z80) , MoCog (6809)·
· Prop OS: SphinxOS·, PropDos , PropCmd··· Search the Propeller forums·(uses advanced Google search)
My cruising website is: ·www.bluemagic.biz·· MultiBlade Props: www.cluso.bluemagic.biz

Ravenkallen

Sorry it took so long to reply. I had a busy week. Thank you for the quick answers and Cluso99, What is the bootloader you are talking about?

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet

Ravenkallen

Sorry it took so long to reply. I had a busy week. Thank you for the quick answers and Cluso99, What is the bootloader you are talking about?

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet

Dr_Acula

I like fsrw... but Kye's code is better for me because it works with more cards, and can do FAT32 and a bootloader.

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=912403

My only few problems so far are, 1. Can the SD card read and write words/ Longs?, 2. If you are reading a whole file larger than 32 Kilobytes do you need any knowledge of clusters or stuff like that?, 3. How hard is it to boot the prop up from a SD card?.

1) Yes you can read and write single bytes to a card - open file, write a byte, close file. Or do it in bigger chunks. Kye's code has all the routines already written and they are easy to use.
2) No need for knowledge of clusters. Just send the bytes in and out and the OS handles it all behind the scenes.
3) From about page 5 of that thread I was posting code for the bootloader. Put KyeDOS in the eeprom, and it boots up with a vga screen and a list of all the .BIN files (which are all precompiled spin programs). Choose which one you want. Plus the help menu. You can add one line of code to run one of those programs if you want it to auto run. I also added xmodem file transfer so you can put new files on the sd card without having to unplug it.

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www.smarthome.viviti.com/propeller

Cluso99

Ravenkallen: The bootloader used in RamBlade is on the RamBlade thread (see link in my signature). It is either in the top 2-3 posts, or near the end, so work backwards. It uses the femto driver. There is also PropCmd there which shows the use of the femto driver quite well I believe. Also, the femto driver (sdspixxxx) has been patched to enforce the SD card to release DO. This is a problem with hardware that shares the SD pins, like TriBlade & RamBlade.

It really boils down to what you are trying to achieve. My objective was to have a minimal EEPROM boot that only knew about the SD card and so could load it's files from there. No need to ever change the EEPROM, just change the SD files. The SD card would know the hardware location and drivers.

There is another recent thread which deals with updating the EEPROM driver from SD files. It uses a 64KB eeprom (many pcbs have the 64KB version, but not all). This is a more complex bootloader. It is based on the one done by mctrivia.

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Links to other interesting threads:

· Home of the MultiBladeProps: TriBlade,·RamBlade,·SixBlade, website
· Single Board Computer:·3 Propeller ICs·and a·TriBladeProp board (ZiCog Z80 Emulator)
· Prop Tools under Development or Completed (Index)
· Emulators: CPUs Z80 etc; Micros Altair etc;· Terminals·VT100 etc; (Index) ZiCog (Z80) , MoCog (6809)·
· Prop OS: SphinxOS·, PropDos , PropCmd··· Search the Propeller forums·(uses advanced Google search)
My cruising website is: ·www.bluemagic.biz·· MultiBlade Props: www.cluso.bluemagic.biz

Ravenkallen

@Cluso99... I just mostly want to do it to say that i can do it. Just another concept under my belt. And thank you again for the help. I have only started learning how to use SD cards a little while ago, so i am not to familiar with the concepts. I did manage to read and write longs from the sd card tonight. I am pretty excited....And thank you Dr_acula for the advice. I guess i will worry about booting from a sd card later when i am more experienced

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet

Ravenkallen

I have one more question. When you open a new file for a write does the system erase the whole previous file and put only the new info in? Or is there a certain memory threshold that you must attain before the system will not erase the whole previous file? Does that make sense?

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet

Ravenkallen

Anybody?

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet

Cluso99

I do not think it erases the file. So I think you have to do this first. Remember, some of us rely on files being contiguous, so deleting files may cause problems. To get around this, I rename them.

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Links to other interesting threads:

· Home of the MultiBladeProps: TriBlade,·RamBlade,·SixBlade, website
· Single Board Computer:·3 Propeller ICs·and a·TriBladeProp board (ZiCog Z80 Emulator)
· Prop Tools under Development or Completed (Index)
· Emulators: CPUs Z80 etc; Micros Altair etc;· Terminals·VT100 etc; (Index) ZiCog (Z80) , MoCog (6809)·
· Prop OS: SphinxOS·, PropDos , PropCmd··· Search the Propeller forums·(uses advanced Google search)
My cruising website is: ·www.bluemagic.biz·· MultiBlade Props: www.cluso.bluemagic.biz

Ravenkallen

Thank you for replying. I though i was all alone for a minute. Well, when i write a new portion of text to the file and then, when i read it, it only outputs the new text and not any of the previous stuff. This is just something that i have noticed from my various testing. I am not sure why this works, perhaps it has something to do with blocks or sectors or something. I mean, i would think that it would not erase it like you said, but it just doesn't for some reason.

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet

kuroneko

Ravenkallen said...
Well, when i write a new portion of text to the file and then, when i read it, it only outputs the new text and not any of the previous stuff.

Note that when you open a file the read/write location is usually positioned at 0. Meaning when you have existing content in the file and you start writing without repositioning this pointer (e.g. to the end of the file, provided seeking is supported) then you overwrite said content.

Ravenkallen

That might explain some of it, but i have tried it with way smaller chunks of new content and it still acts like it erases it. I will try another time to see if it does it again.

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet

kuroneko

Ravenkallen said...
That might explain some of it, but i have tried it with way smaller chunks of new content and it still acts like it erases it. I will try another time to see if it does it again.

If you can reproduce it, a small test case may come in helpful (posted here).

Dr_Acula

Re "Well, when i write a new portion of text to the file and then, when i read it, it only outputs the new text and not any of the previous stuff."

I have not used fsrw, but I can answer for Kye's Sd card driver. There are three modes you can open in - Read, Write and Append. Write starts a new file. Append adds data to an existing file.

If you opened a new file for write, you could try erasing it first. If it exists - then it is definitely gone. If it does not exist, then it won't matter. Obviously you are not going to try erasing it if the file is being appended. The steps are;

Try erasing file
Open for write
Write bytes
Close file

or

Open for append
Write bytes
Close file

If you get a chance, download the zip at the bottom of the first post http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=912403 and unzip it and open up the file 'SD2.0_FATEngine' and quickly scroll down the list of PUB functions. Each is well commented (sometimes the comments are longer than the code) and very quickly you can get a feel for what it can do. eg

PUB openFile(fileName, mode) '' 33 Stack Longs

'' ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
'' │ Opens a file in the current directory for reading, writing, or appending.                                                │
'' │                                                                                                                          │
'' │ All files opened for writing or appending must be closed or they will become corrupted and must be fixed with scandisk.  │ 
'' │                                                                                                                          │
'' │ If the partition is not mounted or an error occurs this function will abort and return a string describing that error.   │
'' │                                                                                                                          │
'' │ The "." and ".." entries are ignored by this function.                                                                   │                                                                   
'' │                                                                                                                          │
'' │ Returns a pointer to the name of the opened file.                                                                        │ 
'' │                                                                                                                          │
'' │ FileName - The name of the file to open for reading, writing or appending.                                               │
'' │ Mode - A character specifing the mode to use. R-Read, W-Write, A-Append. By default the file is opened for reading.     │                                                                                      
'' └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

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www.smarthome.viviti.com/propeller

Ravenkallen

@Dr.Acula..... Is this Sd2.0_fatengine very hard to understand?
@Kuroneko... I will try to post some test code.

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet

Ravenkallen

Okay, here is the demo that i was using. You will need FSRWfemto and sdspifemto, plus parallax serial terminal... Anyway, when you write the test text it

Will read off just fine, but when you omit one or more lines of text and then proceed to write it again, it will only read off the new data.... Maybe somebody

can shed some light on this strange thing.

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet

Dr_Acula

I think I understand the problem but I'm not sure. Ok, you write a file
line1
line2
line3

and then read it back and that works?

then you write it again with
line1
line3

and do you get back
line1
line2
line3
line1
line3

or do you get back
line1
line3


and what do you want to get back?

I am wondering if you want 'append' mode? This is where you can add text to an existing file. From frswFemto;

pub popen(s, mode) | i, sentinel, dirptr, freeentry
{{
'   Close any currently open file, and open a new one with the given
'   file name and mode.  Mode can be "r" "w" "a" or "d" (delete).
'   If the file is opened successfully, 0 will be returned.  If the
'   file did not exist, and the mode was not "w" or "a", -1 will be
'   returned.  Otherwise abort will be called with a negative error
'   code.
}}

and you are current using 'write' mode which erases the previous file of the same name.

  sd.popen(string("alpha.txt"),"w")  '' Open alpha.txt for write

So presuming alpha.txt already exists, try changing that to;

sd.popen(string("alpha.txt"),"a")  '' Open alpha.txt for append

and see if the text is now longer. Every time you call this the text should get longer and longer.

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www.smarthome.viviti.com/propeller

Ravenkallen

I get back only line one and line three. So you said that when you use the "write" method, that it will erase the previous file of the same name? I will try the append method and see if
that helps any. Mainly, i don't really care either way, i just want to know which one works. Thanks again for the assistance

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet