Ade Ramdan

Design and implementation of data storage system using USB flash drive in a microcontroller based data logger

Although Universal Serial Bus (USB) Flash Drives are commonly used as a portable storage medium, the use of them for a remote microcontroller based data logger are still rare. This paper discusses the design and implementation of data storage system using a USB Flash Drive on a microcontroller-based data logger. An expandable data logger was made based on microcontrollers with a master-slave system. A master board handles the entire processes that are including data acquisition, storage, and communication. The data storage system board acts as a slave using ALFAT OEM board and a USB Flash Drive. Its electronic schematic is described and its algorithm is explained. Some tests carried out to prove the design and implementation works properly. The test result showed 3.6% error in 2 minutes saving interval and 2.4% error in 5 minutes saving interval.

Method of storing time-based data using sector number references

Time-based data are recorded values which have a timestamp for each datum. Conventional database usually using time data type to store this value This paper proposes a method for storing time-based data using storage sector number as data timestamp and do not require any file system such as FAT, NTFS, EXT, etc. This paper describes the hardware and algorithms to write and read the time-based data by using sector number references. The number of sector is the differences between the time stamp data and time references. The calculation can be done with the epoch time difference calculation or year, month, and day difference. This method uses very little RAM, simpler circuit, and the code execution is faster than using a file system like FAT/Linux file system. With the proposed method, small microcontrollers that have RAM less than 2Kbytes can access (read/write) SD/MMC without any problem.