Storage capacity for patterns

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello all,

I have my first Arduino board and I am zipping thru the examples. Definitely a lot of fun.

Now I am designing my first project with grid LEDs 8x8 and I am able to turn them on randomly as well as sequentially...quite cool for me.

But a question popped up.

Just how much storage can I use in my program for special designs that I may come up with?

Eventually, I would like to upgrade it to read my patters from a micro card or EEprom but we will cross that bridge later after I perfect my logic.

Thanks again!

2

Just how much storage can I use in my program for special designs that I may come up with?

Roughly from the end of your program to the start of the bootloader.

3

Put it another way - use progmem and you will have access to much more than you are likely to need in the short term -

Its stored in the same memory as your sketch hence the previous reply.

Duane B

rcarduino.blogspot.com

4

Hmmm...that's clear as mud. lol

Guess I'll play with it when the bridge gets closer.

Thanks!

5

It is really simple - you just add a PROGMEM qualifier to the declaration of your pattern arrays, so the compiler doesn't gnerate code to copy ythem into RAM at startup, then use a slightly different method to access them.
That way, instead of, say, one or two kilobytes of pattern storage, you could have tens of k, depending on the size of your flash memory.