esp32 and esp8266: FAT filesystem on external SPI flash memory
In this article, we are going to integrate into our ESP32 or esp8266 an external flash memory in addition to the internal one.
In this article, we are going to integrate into our ESP32 or esp8266 an external flash memory in addition to the internal one.
The first SMT32 prototype boards don’t have an embedded SPI Flash, but the latest, like the WeAct STM32F4 board, has a footprint to add It. And for me, It’s very useful. The only problem Is that this Core doesn’t have a native library, so we will use the Adafruit one.
Arduino SAMD devices don’t have an internal SPI flash memory, but it is clear that a fast and small memory like that can be very useful, so we are to talk again (and again and again and again…) about storage systems.
We continue to explore the rp2040 devices, very interesting microcontrollers. All prototype boards come with integrated SPI Flash. Raspberry Pi selected the LittleFS filesystem to manage this storage, a good compromise between functionality and performance.
For devices like Arduino UNO, we can use the SPI Flash with a basic and very light library, but It can manage a good quantity of memory (from 256Kb to 64Mb), and it’s enough for a lot of projects.
In this series of article about firmware and how to update It, I’d like to add a series of an alternative methods of updating very useful for me.
In this article, we will learn how to use external storage like the SD card to update firmware and filesystem.