in rambling thru youtube arduino programming videos i stumbled across some guy talking about arduinos failing after 100,000 writes to eeprom. just when i think i've got a handle on something, out of the blue comes someone bringing up a potential microcontroller killer problem i have been blissfully unaware of all these years.
I have read some about what eeprom is and how it wears out, but i can't seem to find out if eeprom is written to during normal use. what's normal use ?
here is why i don't just ignore it and go on about my pasteing and trial and error programming. my project involves reading several sensors fairly frequently (every 30 seconds) and storing the values in arrays. i will have several arrays, each with about 5000 int values in them. they record real time, with the newest values bumping out the oldest. i am using a MEGA.
it is all this writing and bumping that has me worried that i am doing something that involves eeprom, and all this activity will soon wear it out.
pratto:
not simple enough. i don't know what a class in the arduino ide is. are you saying that if none of my coding uses the term eeprom, i will be ok ?
Post your sketch to check if you are performing data read/write operations with the internal EEPROM of ATmega2650 MCU of MEGA.
re you saying that if none of my coding uses the term eeprom, i will be ok ?
Effectively, yes
Unless you #include EEPROM.h and then use EEPROM.write(), EEPROM.put() or EEPROM.update() then you will not be writing to the EEPROM and running the risk of writing to it excessively
It would, however, cause no problems if you wrote values to the EEPROM once and read them back as often as required. Note too that the warning about the maximum number of writes is really quite conservative and in any case relates to writing to a single EEPROM location and not the EEPROM as a whole.
GolamMostafa:
Without using EEPROM Class Structure, is it possible to write into EEPROM in any other way -- I mean of using register level instructions?
Yes, that is possible - but in the context of this question I would consider it wildly unlikely. OP may check up on which libraries he is using, may be vaguely possible that one uses EEPROM for something.