Libraries

It's all go at the moment. Last weekend I attended my first DorkBot London meeting. I must confess I didn't really know what to expect but spent a very pleasant, if cold, day in the company of feverishly soldering artists and makers. I spoke to many people about uFat and the new DevicePrint library. This is some code that allows formatted textual output to a buffer in memory and thus onto some form of persistent storage...


You can get the new library here SMB_LIBRARIES. It adheres to the principles introduced in uFat:- it is lightweight and device agnostic. It should work with any storage medium as long as there is a function available to write a 512 byte sector.

The the code is initialised with a pointer to a buffer, some basic information about the destination sector area, and a writer function. From that point on you are free to use the familiar .print() functions which are best known in their Serial library incarnation. The Arduino base library provides you with so much more than a blinking LED ;)

As usual (1) - there is copious documentation in the form of comments and an example sketch configured to use MMC storage for you to play with. If you wanted to try it out without any devices available then you could always change the write proxy routine to dump the stored data to serial.

As usual (2) - comments welcome!

Toasted and

Say Hello to uFat2

There has been a flurry of activity recently and a number of uFat users have been in touch, which is nice! In response to this I think it's about time that I posted my latest updates. The code is thoroughly commented and should answer most questions.

Most notably I have broken the dependency on a particular device library. Now you can use any code capable of reading 512byte sectors from any FAT formatted device.

Since a number of you dear readers asked about traversing FAT directories I've abstracted this requirement into a core feature. By providing a function callback you can now process FAT directory entries to your heart's desire!

It's still a lightweight library but there may be new ideas here for some beginner programmers. I don't think there's anything that should scare anyone though. Concepts such as pointers to functions and PROGMEM data storage are used throughout, but you should be able to use this as it stands without this knowledge. The example sketch should cover the most obvious use cases of printing a listing of files and updating a file on the card.

I developed this under the latest IDE at time of writing which is Arduino-0012. As usual, I'm happy to help with any problems or queries you might have.

Here's the goods: SMB_LIBRARIES and for pudding: The demo sketch

The code is now hosted on Google Code. You can download it here

Refer to the header files for usage, tips, and perhaps a LOL or two. If you're lucky ;)

Written, admired and duly