Advanced PIC18 Projects—SD Card Projects:Using the Card Filing System

PROJECT 7.3—Using the Card Filing System

The hardware of this project is the same as for Project 7.1 (i.e., as shown in Figure 7.8).

In this project, a file called MYFILE55.TXT is created on the SD card. String “This is MYFILE.TXT” is written to the file initially. Then the string “This is the added data.. .” is appended to the file. The program then reads the contents of the file and sends the string “This is MYFILE.TXT. This is the added data.. .” to the UART, enabling the data to be displayed on the PC screen when HyperTerminal is run.

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The program listing of the project is given in Figure 7.12 (program SD3.C).

At the beginning of the program the UART is initialized to 2400 baud. Then the SPI bus and the FAT file system are initialized as required by the library.

The program then creates file MYFILE55.TXT by calling library function Mmc_Fat_Assign with the arguments as the filename and the creation flag 0x80, which tells the function to create a new file if the file does not exist. The filename should be in “filename.extension” format, though it is also possible to specify an eight-digit filename and a three-digit extension with no “.” between them, as the “.” will be inserted by the function. Other allowed values of the creation flag are given in Table 7.8. Note that the SD card must have been formatted in FAT16 before we can read or write to it. Most new cards are already formatted, but we can also use the Mmc_Fat_QuickFormat function to format a card.

The file is cleared (if it is not already empty) using function call Mmc_Fat_Rewrite, and then the string “This is MYFILE.TXT” is written to the file by calling library function Mmc_Fat_Write. Note that the size of the data to be written must be specified as the second argument of this function call. Then Mmc_Fat_Append is called and the second string “This is the added data.. .” is appended to the file.

Calling function Mmc_Fat_Reset sets the file pointer to the beginning of the file and also returns the size of the file. Finally, a for loop is set up to read each character from the file using the Mmc_Fat_Read function call, and the characters read are sent to the UART with the Usart_Write function call.

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