Programming 32-bit Microcontrollers in C

Day 15 File I/O

The Plan

Just yesterday, we developed a basic interface module (both software and hardware) to gain access to an SD/MMC card and support applications that require large amounts of data storage. A similar interface could be built for several other types of mass storage media, but in this lesson we will instead focus on the algorithms and data structures required to properly share information on the mass storage device with the most common PC operating systems (DOS, Windows, and some Linux distributions). In other words, we will develop a module for access to a standard file system known commonly as FAT16.

The first FAT file system was created by Bill Gates and Marc McDonald in 1977 for managing disks in Microsoft Disk BASIC. It ...