Alfat Sd/mmc

[Ron Marcus]

It works for me. Any output from Alfat at all?

[eoasap]

what i'm doing is declaring bufchar as a byte, and then loop at the end of

read:
serin2 ALFAT_TX,84,[bufchar]
lcdout bufchar
goto read

like that, i get a bunch of gibberish. yesterday i was getting numbers like 292 (clears screen) 302 (clears screen) 306 (clears screen) .... etc

[Ron Marcus]

what i'm doing is declaring bufchar as a byte, and then loop at the end of

read:
serin2 ALFAT_TX,84,[bufchar]
lcdout bufchar
goto read

like that, i get a bunch of gibberish. yesterday i was getting numbers like 292 (clears screen) 302 (clears screen) 306 (clears screen) .... etc

When I get to my lab, I will send you a snippet of code. bufchar is a byte variable. It can't go over 255, so there must be a couple of variables in there.

[eoasap]

Thanks Ron, i'm sure there's just something minor i'm leaving out (hopefully!) you've already been such a big help! thanks

[PaulBarter]

Did you ever get this sorted? I'm about to embark on a very similar exercise with a 16F877 and alfatSD board using PBP. Any snippets of code or other advice would be greatly appreciated. TIA

[Ron Marcus]

Did you ever get this sorted? I'm about to embark on a very similar exercise with a 16F877 and alfatSD board using PBP. Any snippets of code or other advice would be greatly appreciated. TIA

Sorry, I've been out of the country till last night. If at all possible, work with the SD or development board for these units to start with.I am a huge proponent of development kits, they are more money, but cheap in time.
Alfat is extremely finicky in regards to syntax and timing, and I have spent many hours over "spelling errors" and formatting issues.
Next, if possible, use text mode with the UART. This is the easiest, and most forgiving.Also, the learning curve is more gentle. I was one of the unlucky few that had to use SPI in framed mode. Now, there are plenty of programming examples in "C", and also Proton basic. The latter was invaluable, but required some translation.
SPI gives you the ability to free up your hardware UART and run at some impressive speeds, especially with a MSSP module as on the 18 series chips. You have to account for every single bit going into and out of the Alfat, but it works reliably. I went with framed mode, because it was easier to parse data and error responses(i've had more than my share!). The Alfat user's forum is quite helpful too.

[PaulBarter]

Thanks for that,

I have ordered the ALFATSD board but it'll be a couple of weeks to get to New Zealand. I am planning on using UART in text mode since my application is a simple serial logger.

I've also looked at the proton basic stuff and it looks helpful but I won't know how helpful until I dive into the actual project.
I was hoping you or eoasap had a bare bones PBP program to get me started since I'm not using the proton development board.
Perhaps when I get my chip I'll cobble one together and may re-post if I hit a brick wall. I'm still a bit of a newbie but have had pretty good sucess with serial comms on these chips already. the only unkown is writing this serial data to a text file. Thanks again for the timely reply.