Potential Hard Drive on RC?

Technical Programming
1

On a purely hypothetical note, does anyone here know where the code and long-term memory is kept on the RC?

How much room does this storage facility have?

Can it be accessed during the use of the RC?

(This is NOT for AI purposes!)

Thanks a lot,

2

Yes. It is stored on the BS2SX, in the 2048k (per slot) of EEPROM. You can access it during runtime, but chances are life will get really messy, really fast. Look at the READ and WRITE commands if you really want to try. Also, you may need to “trick” the stamp software into letting you write to locations where the program is stored. Just declare a word-sized variable and use it as your location index.

–Rob

3

EEPROM’s lifecycle is only about 100K accesses (reads or writes).

THis means that if you access the EEPROM every look, and one loop takes 26 ms, you get about, your EEPROM is bad after 2,600,000ms = 2600s = 16 minutes, 40 seconds of use before you start to have to start worrying if you’re burning out your EEPROM.

Then you have to hope that you never want to write a program big enough to fill up the EEPROM to the point where your program hits the bad memory. Once that happens, you’re SOL. You might be able to change slots, but I’d personally rather avoid the whole mess.

4

Would it be possible to somehow attach an external hard drive?

Wiring it through a PWM input and a PWM output does not sound impossible. Acessing the data on the drive is hard, but manageable.

Are there any large qualms against using a hard drive on a robot?

Thanks a lot,

5

Ummm… unless you want to build an IDE or SCSI controller, it isn’t going to work. Besides, HDs are illegal as they are electronics that can’t be bought from DigiKey.

6

I don’t think you’ll want very much storage for this game. And your ability to get data in and out is pretty limited. Even if you used ALL the digital inputs with a sample rate of every 26ms you are only looking at 608 BITS per second.

Its surprising how little storage it takes to do some really cool things.

You might look at external flash mem if you really want some kind of non-volitile external memory but your bit rate to it would still be very poor.

7

Thanks for the input!

8

*Originally posted by Neal Turett *
**EEPROM’s lifecycle is only about 100K accesses (reads or writes).
**

No, EEPROMs only have a limited number of writes. You can read as many times as you want. So, you don’t want to write data to the EEPROM in the middle of a match, but it’s fine for doing lookup tables, etc.

9

if you really want to know how to interface a hard drive search for build your own Mp3 player on google. I ll send a link soon.
interesting stuff but really difficult to build. good luck though! more power to you but it’s gonna be difficult.
-Andy

10

try www.mp3projects.com
good luck
-Andy

11

*Originally posted by Neal Turett *
EEPROM’s lifecycle is only about 100K accesses (reads or writes).

You sure about that? I thought it was only the write lifecyle that came into play. I could be mistaken though.