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08-25-2008, 01:29 PM
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#1 | | Software engineer/hacker
Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Posts: 5,061
 | Give your TX/LD a multi-gigabyte internal drive
So using my SDHC driver, a few wires, a few free GPIOs in the TX and LD, a bit-banged SD interface, and a few microSdhc cards my TX now has a 32GB internal drive!
How it works? I found 7 free GPIOs on the TX, wired them up to the 4 8gb microSDHC cards internally, and modified my driver to use this as an SD interface, and then to treat the 4 cards as one big card. So now I have a 32GB internal drive that is always with me. The 1-bit bit-banged interface is not stellar-fast (4MBit/s is what I get) but it is enough for me.
The cool part? SD slot still usable normally, no case modifications, driver is in ROM
Same can be done for Treos, LD, T5, Z72, E2, Z31, TC, Zodiac, iQue, etc... Cool huh?
__________________ Annoying me is NOT an approved way of encouraging me to produce software My software:PowerSDHC, PowerDrive, nuRom, UDMH, warpSpeed, PowerDiGi, brightnessFix, etc... Get it all here:http://www.PalmPowerups.com
Last edited by dmitrygr : 08-25-2008 at 01:47 PM.
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08-25-2008, 01:34 PM
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#2 | | Registered User
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 595
| Quote: | Originally Posted by dmitrygr So using my SDHC driver, a few wires, a few free GPIOs in the TX and LD, a bit-banged SD interface, and a few microSdhc cards my TX now has a 32GB internal drive!
How it works? I found 7 free GPIOs on the TX, wired them up to the 4 8gb microSDHC cards internally, and modified my driver to use this as an SD interface, and then to treat the 4 cards as one big card. So now I have a 32GB internal drive that is always with me. The 1-bit bt-banged interface is not stellarly fast (4MBit/s is what I get) but it is enough for me.
The cool part? SD slot still usable normally, no case modifications, driver is in ROM
Same can be done for Treos, LD, T5, Z72, E2, Z31, TC, Zodiac, iQue, etc... Cool huh? |
Yes indeed. Way cool. Except I'm chicken to even try it.......  | |
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08-25-2008, 01:46 PM
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#3 | | Software engineer/hacker
Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Posts: 5,061
| It appears as an internal built-in card that all apps see.
I was posting here just as a research project. I am not at this point offering this process or directions to anyone, [yet?].
__________________ Annoying me is NOT an approved way of encouraging me to produce software My software:PowerSDHC, PowerDrive, nuRom, UDMH, warpSpeed, PowerDiGi, brightnessFix, etc... Get it all here:http://www.PalmPowerups.com | |
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08-25-2008, 01:49 PM
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#4 | | Software engineer/hacker
Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Posts: 5,061
| Also, this idea expands to any size. The more GPIOs I can find to use, the more cards I can use. It's simple. There are 3 common wires, and one for each card. So to have one card you need 4 GPIOs, for 2 cards you need 5, for 4 cards you need 7, and so on...
So if you find 10 free GPIOs in your device you can have (10-3 = 7) 7 cards builtin. The biggest microSDHC you can get is 8GB, so that is 56GB total 
__________________ Annoying me is NOT an approved way of encouraging me to produce software My software:PowerSDHC, PowerDrive, nuRom, UDMH, warpSpeed, PowerDiGi, brightnessFix, etc... Get it all here:http://www.PalmPowerups.com | |
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08-25-2008, 01:53 PM
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#5 | | mytreo.net Downloads Exec
Join Date: Mar 2008
Posts: 92
| Hmmm
I guess you're sayin this should be possible without your driver on the Treo? I wonder if the Treo has the same free GPIOs then... see now you've gotten me curious and I might just have to go open this thing up (wonder if Sprint will let me keep this 700p as a text device since they're replacing it tomorrow again under warranty)...
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08-25-2008, 01:58 PM
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#6 | | Registered User
Join Date: Mar 2008
Posts: 195
| Quote: | Originally Posted by dmitrygr
Same can be done for Treos, Cool huh? |
Ok
Just give me the address and I'll send you my 755 to try it out on.  | |
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08-25-2008, 02:16 PM
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#7 | | Software engineer/hacker
Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Posts: 5,061
| It needs my driver, of course, but besides that nothing is needed
__________________ Annoying me is NOT an approved way of encouraging me to produce software My software:PowerSDHC, PowerDrive, nuRom, UDMH, warpSpeed, PowerDiGi, brightnessFix, etc... Get it all here:http://www.PalmPowerups.com | |
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08-25-2008, 02:22 PM
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#8 | | Registered User
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 100
| Very cool, would like to see some pics of how you fit everything internally. Do you need a modified SDHC driver to do this? | |
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08-25-2008, 02:26 PM
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#9 | | Software engineer/hacker
Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Posts: 5,061
| fitting things is not hard. the wires are tiny and the microsdhc card is small. the driver is my SDHC driver with a new AAL(aalModBitBangedSdGpio) and DAL(dalModTxRawGpio) modules
__________________ Annoying me is NOT an approved way of encouraging me to produce software My software:PowerSDHC, PowerDrive, nuRom, UDMH, warpSpeed, PowerDiGi, brightnessFix, etc... Get it all here:http://www.PalmPowerups.com | |
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08-25-2008, 02:36 PM
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#10 | | Registered User
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 100
| One more question. Is it will be possible to improve upon the max 4MBit/s read/write speed? | |
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08-25-2008, 02:44 PM
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#11 | | Software engineer/hacker
Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Posts: 5,061
| Not really. To get better speeds you need hardware support or faster GPIOs. Clearly the hardware supported SD interface is used by the SD slot, so I have to implement the entire physical layer in software, and Pxa270 does not really work well if you try to toggle GPIOs at more than 4MHz, so the clock pin thus cannot be faster than that. I am not sure you understand what a feat it is to even get 4MBit/s out of it! Most of the sdBitBanged***() functions had to be written in assembly and hand-optimized. the C versions do not attain over 1MBit/s speed.
With hardware you can say to hardware "send command X, wait for Y bytes of data" with bit-banged approach it degrades to "send command X bit by bit by toggling up and down the correct wire, also toggle clock at the same time, and then receive the response bit by bit while toggling clock and keeping to thew SD specced timing" It really is much more work.
__________________ Annoying me is NOT an approved way of encouraging me to produce software My software:PowerSDHC, PowerDrive, nuRom, UDMH, warpSpeed, PowerDiGi, brightnessFix, etc... Get it all here:http://www.PalmPowerups.com | |
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08-25-2008, 02:58 PM
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#12 | | Registered User
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 100
| I always thought programming in assembly was fun you young people, just kidding. And I should know better than to question you. If it was possible you would have done it already. I was just unsure of the hardware limitations. | |
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08-25-2008, 03:07 PM
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#13 | | Software engineer/hacker
Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Posts: 5,061
| ARM assembly is fun. The not-fun part is having to order instructions by hand to get the timing right and at the same time introduce no delays.
__________________ Annoying me is NOT an approved way of encouraging me to produce software My software:PowerSDHC, PowerDrive, nuRom, UDMH, warpSpeed, PowerDiGi, brightnessFix, etc... Get it all here:http://www.PalmPowerups.com | |
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08-25-2008, 03:54 PM
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#14 | | Behold the Elixir of Life
Join Date: Jun 2003
Posts: 931
| GPIOs
I had to look this stuff up to try to understand what you are saying!! General Purpose Input/Output From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from GPIO)
Jump to: navigation, search General (GPIO) devices provide a set of IO ports that can be configured for either input or output, compounded by the resemblance to GP1 and GP0. One special kind of GPIO is SGPIO.
The general-purpose input/output (GPIO) peripheral provides dedicated general-purpose pins that can be configured as either inputs or outputs. When configured as an output, you can write to an internal register to control the state driven on the output pin. When configured as an input, you can detect the state of the input by reading the state of an internal register.
In addition, the GPIO peripheral can produce CPU interrupts and enhanced Direct Memory Access (EDMA) events in different interrupt/event generation modes. | |
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08-25-2008, 04:00 PM
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#15 | | Software engineer/hacker
Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Posts: 5,061
| in my context GPIO is a a processor pin that the processor can control as being one of {output: 0, output: 1, input: Hi-Z}
Sadly no interrupts or DMA in this case
__________________ Annoying me is NOT an approved way of encouraging me to produce software My software:PowerSDHC, PowerDrive, nuRom, UDMH, warpSpeed, PowerDiGi, brightnessFix, etc... Get it all here:http://www.PalmPowerups.com | |
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