Datalogging
Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2008 6:35 am
I just heard from this board so please excuse me if I'm on wrong section or this has been said before.
I for one am strongly with embedded datalogger. It could be done as addon (like I suppose it's currently planned?) but everyone will want it anyway.
If I'd design such FW/HW I'd use separate SD-card (with cardreader components on EMS) because if you store logs on regular memory chip instead, you can't take the logs with you when you leave the car unless you take the whole EMS/datalogger with you (I see a point of external datalogger here). All people still don't have laptops or they may be old and big (people don't buy new laptops only to be able to configure their EMS). I agree that laptops are must when initially tuning the setup but after that we usually could get away with less.
Minor changes to settings could be done if EMS could store system configuration on SD/MMC (again, that card has easiest route via SPI) and also read it back on startup if certain byte on card is set (or switch if it needs to be on HW). Just think of the ease of getting card from car, analysing stuff on home comp without any hurry, making little changes on card, getting back to car and popping card back and drive to work. Also with multiple cards you can store different setups easily (you could even switch on different setups on road without laptop if needed) and transfer data as you like.
Having fs-filestructure on SD is also all good as after that you can transfer and read your files virtually from every computer which has SD-cardreader. Dosfs is at least free source fs for mcu's. I swear I used to have big list of links about SPI-programming on mcu's but it seems like I've lost my bookmarks (had major HDD-crash last year), but I doubt it's hard getting required stuff figured, it's just plain work..
Just some thoughts.
edit->just a little clarification
I for one am strongly with embedded datalogger. It could be done as addon (like I suppose it's currently planned?) but everyone will want it anyway.
If I'd design such FW/HW I'd use separate SD-card (with cardreader components on EMS) because if you store logs on regular memory chip instead, you can't take the logs with you when you leave the car unless you take the whole EMS/datalogger with you (I see a point of external datalogger here). All people still don't have laptops or they may be old and big (people don't buy new laptops only to be able to configure their EMS). I agree that laptops are must when initially tuning the setup but after that we usually could get away with less.
Minor changes to settings could be done if EMS could store system configuration on SD/MMC (again, that card has easiest route via SPI) and also read it back on startup if certain byte on card is set (or switch if it needs to be on HW). Just think of the ease of getting card from car, analysing stuff on home comp without any hurry, making little changes on card, getting back to car and popping card back and drive to work. Also with multiple cards you can store different setups easily (you could even switch on different setups on road without laptop if needed) and transfer data as you like.
Having fs-filestructure on SD is also all good as after that you can transfer and read your files virtually from every computer which has SD-cardreader. Dosfs is at least free source fs for mcu's. I swear I used to have big list of links about SPI-programming on mcu's but it seems like I've lost my bookmarks (had major HDD-crash last year), but I doubt it's hard getting required stuff figured, it's just plain work..
Just some thoughts.
edit->just a little clarification