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Writing to Flash cards — Parallax Forums

Writing to Flash cards

Andy McLeodAndy McLeod Posts: 40
edited 2007-05-23 20:23 in BASIC Stamp
We are developing a field data logger for our application that will require large capacity of ~10MB per week for 2 month deployments. The logger will be writing GPS RMC strings at 1hz to the flash card. Any ideas?

Comments

  • Mike GreenMike Green Posts: 23,101
    edited 2007-05-23 13:59
    Both Vinculum (www.vinculum.com) and GHI Electronics (www.ghielectronics.com/) make USB host interfaces that can store to USB flash drives using a simple serial protocol and will interface to a Stamp. GHI also makes an SD card interface using the same chip. There are other manufacturers as well, but I have experience with these. Hitt Consulting makes a data logger for SD cards, but has a limit of 32MB of accessible storage which wouldn't work in your case.
  • Andy McLeodAndy McLeod Posts: 40
    edited 2007-05-23 16:18
    That's exactly what I'm looking for. Thank you young feller!
  • Mike GreenMike Green Posts: 23,101
    edited 2007-05-23 16:29
    Another idea would be to use a Propeller rather than a Stamp. There are library routines that provide for PC-compatible SD card access without any additional hardware (other than an SD card socket and maybe a couple of pull-up resistors). The Propeller can talk to a GPS receiver and can do some processing on the data much more easily than a Stamp since it does 32-bit arithmetic and has a full floating point library available. The Propeller Protoboard is cheap and may be all you need.
  • richard_hrichard_h Posts: 11
    edited 2007-05-23 17:55
    Mr Green:

    Is there any documentation (schematics, etc) on using a propeller chip in this manner?

    Thanks,
    Richard
  • Mike GreenMike Green Posts: 23,101
    edited 2007-05-23 20:23
    If you go to the main Propeller page, on the upper right you'll see a link for the Object Exchange.· There you'll find a "FAT16 routines" library.· As is usual, the source program has comments that describe how to use it and how to wire it up.· You'll also find an "Extended FullDuplexSerial" library that helps in parsing the GPS strings.· The FullDuplexSerial library provides a full duplex serial I/O channel (or several) and is distributed with the Propeller Tool (the IDE for Spin and the Propeller assembly language).· The Floating Point library is also found in the Object Exchange.· You can download the Propeller Tool and the Propeller Manual and datasheet from the downloads page of the Propeller area.

    If you search the Propeller forum, you'll see discussions of all of these and discussions of projects that others have done with GPS receivers.
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