USB Thumbdrives, SD Cards, serial flash, and other low-cost memory products have become common place in embedded products these days - many times more than one memory format is used on the same product. Microchip’s family of PIC32 microcontrollers easily interfaces to these popular memory products and has plenty of processing performance to simultaneously manage multiple drive sources. However, the necessary software was missing until Microchip ported FATFs (pronounced “Fat F-S”) to the PIC32 microcontroller family. FATFs is an open source file system software stack designed for microcontrollers to easily access multiple media sources during run-time. This small footprint low-overhead software supports FAT 32, FAT 16, and FAT 12 formats using an 8.3 file name format. Lastly, this open source software has a license model that will put a big smile on your boss’s face – it is free for commercial use and there are no requirements to share your precious source code with anyone else.

Using FATFs as your application’s file system has many advantages such as write buffer flushing, large number of media drive support, easy drive addition, compile time options to minimize memory footprint, simultaneous multiple media access, and application control of file structures. FATFs handles corruption due to accidental failure or RTOS context switching by providing a routine, f _ sync, that flushes the write buffer. The user can easily add drives to the file system by modifying the source file, diskio.

Read more: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/Market_Communication/MARCH%202009%...