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DISCONTINUED ITEMS

The original PIC16F876 3.3volt Prototype

The MMC is in a socket which is soldered to a small pcb. The small pcb has a 7 pin male header at the bottom which plugs into a female header on the prototype. This allows one to use the  alternative connection shown below if an MMC socket is not available. The DB9 serial connector serves a dual purpose. It is used for data I/O to and also to program the 16F876 serially. A MAX233 (or equiv) was used instead of a MAX232 simply because it requires no external capacitors. In order for the 16F876 to operate at 3.3v its built-in brownout protection feature (BOR, PwrUpTimer) has to be disabled. The I2C eeprom is used as a temporary storage area. The SD/MMC writes data in blocks of 512 bytes, therefore it is not possible to write just one or two bytes at a time (does not apply to reading). Therefore one needs to store the data somewhere until it reaches a minimum of 512 bytes. Any I2C eeprom can be used as long as it can hold 512 bytes or more of data.

SD card proto pcb. for SD/MMC projects

The modified MMC board which can use MMC as well as SD cards.

Same size as the MMC3 board except that it can be used with SD cards as well as MMC cards. The standard kit comes as shown below but without the SD card. It includes a PIC18LF2620 (or a PIC16F876 by request), a Max233 (or equiv), an LM2937 3.3v regulator, SMD resistors, a 10Mhz resonator and a FM24CL64 FRAM plus the DB9 connector, SD and IC sockets, reset switch. Experimental (for non-commercial use) FAT16 demo code available from MELabs in their sample code section. A modified version for the pins on the SDMM3F board is available here (sdfs2620_demo.zip).

Similar to the MMSD3F design but 25% smaller in size

Shown assembled (SD card not included)

Please Note: This kit requires soldering surface mount parts (resistors,capacitors, IC3232 and FRAM chips. Working with SMD parts does require certain soldering skills

Important: FAT file system is owned by Microsoft and must be licensed from them if you intend to sell a product that uses it.  More information can be found on Microsoft's web site.

Original experimental PIC16F876 demo source code available by email request

Available experimental (non-commercial use) source code for reading/writing to a FAT16 formatted MMC. The code for the MMSD3F  board and the SDMM3F board is the same. The code is written in PICBasicPro v2.50c  from MELabs.

PLEASE NOTE: The firmware is not a complete file system with . This would not be possible without a considerable amount of RAM to build large buffers. It only works with a single file in the root directory (no sub directories) and only FAT16 is supported. It is assumed that the user can modify and re-compile the code as needed for their own purposes. The code has been successfully tested with a variety of MMC and SD cards from several manufacturers. There are rare occasions when a card fails to be initialized.

Information: All PIC to MMC transactions must be in chunks of 512 bytes. Data to be stored is first saved to the external FRAM and is then automatically transferred to the MMC  when 512 bytes accumulate. Storage is limited to a single file only, mainly due to the constraints of the PIC and available RAM. The code occupies almost 4k of programming space. As delivered, it demonstrates writing to a card by writing a 16kb ASCII text file to the card which can be read in the PC's card reader. Each time the code is executed the file is appended with 16kb more of text. The user can combine the source code in their own application by performing two steps.  Bytes of data to be stored are sequentially assigned to a variable (E_BYTE) and then a subroutine (ESAVE) is called. Since the MMC/SD only writes in chunks of 512 bytes, the data is temporarily stored in the external eeprom. When 512 bytes have been accumulated the eeprom "buffer" is transferred to the MMC/SD card and the card's FAT and directory are updated at the same time. Since this transfer and updating consumes time,  it makes it impossible to "stream" data to the MMC. Incoming data would have to be controlled by some means so that it pauses a few milliseconds every 512 bytes for the updated to complete. It is possible to use a PIC18LF2620 instead of the PIC16F876. The 18LF2620 has over 3k of RAM. This allows the creation of software buffers and increases the I/O rate considerably. Sample 18LF2620 code is also included. The original premise of the code was to implement it in long term data logging projects where data was received at a slow I/O rate. Using the demo source code one can modify/create their own applications.

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AVR is a registered trademark of Atmel Corp., MAX is the trademark of Maxim Corporation