Hydra SD Expansion Card

alinious

I have begun work on interfacing a SD card to the Hydra Game Development system using a blank experimenter card and a SD breakout board. I have posted several pictures of its construction on my website along with links to the components that were used. This is still a work in progress, so please bear with me.

The following is a direct link to the image gallery I have setup to display the work I have accomplished so far: Image Gallery - http://www.balichmicro.com/image. Also, the website I am building (Balich Micro Technologies - http://www.balichmicro.com) is quite new and a large work in progress. I have high hopes for posting much of the work I have done regarding all realms of electronics, but this is a feat that is easier said than done.

Comments, criticisms, and ideas are always appreciated.

-Alan

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"I learn when I succeed, but I learn more when I fail."

Post Edited (alinious) : 3/25/2007 6:03:46 AM GMT

AndreL

Sweet! What's your website? Also, if its not too late you might want to get a Right Angle adaptor so you can push the SD card in vertically. if you already soldered it, send me a PM with your postal address, I will shoot you another blank card. I think I have some prototypes around.

Andre'

alinious

Andre',

Thank-you for the kind words and suggestions! I've edited my initial post with embedded links along with my website address: (http://www.balichmicro.com) and image gallery link: (http://www.balichmicro.com/image). There is not much content, besides the Hydra SD Expansion Card, on the website right now, but that is going to be changing quickly.

Construction wise, I did the following (my website will soon reflect the same information):

• First, soldered a single vertical 12 pin (only 11 used) female header to the SD breakout board; this allows me to remove the breakout board and easily use it for future projects.
• Second, soldered a right angle 12 male header to the Experimenter card.
• Third, soldered another vertical 12 pin female header to the Experimenter card, which is connected via the PCB's traces to the right angle male header.
• Fourth, soldered a double vertical 20 pin female header to the Experimenter card, which allows me to run jumper wires from the Prop IO to the SD card IO.

The SD card breakout board is perpendicular to the Experimenter board. It allows me to wrap a finger around the bottom of the breakout board to provide extra support when I insert the SD card. I had consider mounting the SD breakout board vertically, but I have plans to try and squeeze some more components on the Experimenter board.

I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed your two latest books The Black Art of Video Game Console Design and Game Programming for the Propeller Powered Hydra.

Thanks again

-Alan

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"I learn when I succeed, but I learn more when I fail."

Jasper_M

Ah, that looks good ^_^ I'm gonna build one too, when I get an SD card slot... Which pins did you solder where? So that we could have alike cards?

AndreL

Cool, well no matter what finish it! That's the #1 most important thing. No one finishes anything, that's why they call them hobbyist [noparse]:)[/noparse] I don't care if blood is pouring out of my eyes and I haven't eaten in month I finish everything I start. A cool app with the SD card would be to play movies out of it, at low rez you could store avi or something and play an entire movie out of it as long as the viewport is small and the frame rate is 25-30 fps, totally doable. That might be a fun thing to do.

Andre'

Jasper_M

I'm currently working on a filesystem for EEPROM - I can already navigate in FS based on file pointers (handles... BTW, is this called 'traversin'? I don't really know the terminology...). I can also create, delete, get by filename and read files. I'm working on buffered I/O and writing now. Then I make it support 512BYTE pages so that I can make it support SD later. The whole thing - including EEPROM driver is on a single cog, with 2 ASM pages. The block driver (ie. currently only EEPROM driver) can be changed to another block driver - like SD driver. Even an EEPROM FS & SD FS could be used with only one cog - simultaneously, the driver can swap block driver pages accordingly.