Is it possible to get an Arduino to store data on a USB thumb drive?
I realise I'd need a UART<>USB (FT232) to do the translation, but other than that, what other magic would be involved?
If I could contrive to save all my data (ASCII text) on the 'duino, would there be any issues with simply writing it straight to the thumb drive?
The Arduino would have to be the USB master. Currently, it's not even a slave, which is a simpler circuit. It's just wiggling UART bits to be a serial device.
The Arduino would have to know the usbstorage protocol to talk to the thumbdrive. I don't know if that's just like SD or not.
The Arduino would have to treat the flash capacity as a vanilla block device, or support a filesystem. There are software implementations available to support the FAT12/FAT16 you see on most SD cards and thumbdrives. With these libraries, your limitations are short filenames and no subdirectories.
Hmmmm. This is starting to sound dangerous... :-?
I was thinking that writing to USB "thumb" drive wouldn't be appreciably different than writing to an SD card. What I need to do is go from a serial connection on a piece of test gear and store the data on something that's harder to lose (physically) than an SD/MMC card -- the test equipment is in the field (no place I'd want to take a laptop), and it would be a WHOLE lot easier swapping out solid-state memory than hauling the thing back to the shop to download to a PC.
I was thinking that writing to USB "thumb" drive wouldn't be appreciably different than writing to an SD card.
It's actually significantly different.
There is a solution called VDIP which you might want to investigate but it requires acquiring another device.
--Phil.
I'll have a look at that -- thanks.