Is the Panda only able to use SD cards connected to the 8 IO pads on the end of the board or can it also talk to SD cards through SPI interface? This Sparkfun board [url]http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9802[/url] is an example. Looking at the PersistantStorage class it doesn’t appear to take any parameters to tell it how the SD card is connected to the Panda or is there a way to use the NETMF from Microsoft to talk to the SPI device and mount a file system that way?
SPI is slow and we do not support it on SD cards. Have you seen this? GHI Electronics – Where Hardware Meets Software It is not that hard to add and an SD card and this will keep the pins free on your shields
Well not having SPI is really slow… For data logging applications it is more than adequate.
Is there any intentions to add this to the permanent storage class? It is defacto industry standard whether it is slow or not. I there a way for me to request it to be added?
You have an SD support on a 4-bit bus but you do not want that and want to use SPI instead? What is the benefit?
@ Tom7
It’s not going to make sense for GHI to add SPI - even though there are tons of “Arduino-Format” boards out there that have SDCard sockets wired for SPI on them. Use Panda II with built-in SDCard and buy other add-on boards. Or get together with others and make your own.
Life is not always fair.
And eventually GHI will have all the shields you need - if they don’t already.
It is so nice the way you make your customer feel like they are stupid and/or ignorant.
No I don’t have the hardware for the 4-bit bus so I have to buy/make it. I assume this is what is needed if I feel uncomfortable soldering up a socket [url]http://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/product/181[/url].
It appears that the old Panda SD socket board in not on the GHI site anymore.
The benefit is this shield compatible system will be compatible with shields that have SPI SD or MicroSD cards. Again… For data logging and probably most other file writing applications your speed comments are not a big issue.
It is unfortunate that it seems the permanent storage class was also written that it was not abstracted from the hardware so that could but implemented with the already written SPI class although I can understand that it might be asking too much with the constraints of the system.
I believe there is some misunderstanding. I was asking on the benefit from this to learn of your needs as we maybe able to fill them. The other comments are from the community and not from GHI.