Limitations?

ice-egoz

are they any limits to the number of times the BS2p can be programmed to?? and does that lead to the BS2p to tire out and not performing on tip-top condition?

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I need all ya guidance Masters. [noparse]:)[/noparse]

allanlane5

Yes, the EEPROM will 'wear out' after 1 million writes (maybe 10 million, depending on the part).

Thus, if you program it once every minute, it will wear out in 1.9 years (assuming the 1 million figure).

Now, if you use the WRITE command to write to the same eeprom location every 10 mSec, then it can wear out in 6.9 DAYS.

So, you just have to be careful. Programming it is not the problem, you don't do it that often. Using the EEPROM as general memory can cause problems.

Ken Gracey

For kicks, I've only seen one EEPROM on a Stamp actually "wear out". This was a result of a program which was using READ/WRITE to the same cell about a hundred times a second in a datalogger. The customer (in Holland) brought his project into one of our Educator's Courses and it took us the better part of an hour to figure out why this particular EEPROM cell was destroyed and would only read back a "1". Debugging his code with Dutch comments was a bit tough. But this failure was not from repetetive programming.

If you could program your Stamp once every three seconds, it would take you 833 hours of continuous programming to do some damage with 1,000,000 program downloads. That's without a bathroom or coffee break, or an EEPROM that exceeds the spec.

Ken