Researching the ALFAT SDR Board

Excuse the green shine around this post, but I am trying to do some research into an application fix that I have no prior experience in. We have a product that we hope to bring to market within the year and are looking to come up with a simple datalogging circuit. The ALFAT SDR board looks promising. My main goal would be to hook this up to our uC, hopefully through a UART, send data to an SD card with the FAT16/FAT32 file system. Then plug into a computer to remove the files that we put on the SD card. Does this product do the trick? How would I hook up to our existing uC? How would I talk to the SD card from the uC? Thanks for the help look forward t hearing back.

Steve

Yes !! So does ALFAT OEM and ALFAT SDR.

Connect a UART port on your uC to the UART pins on the board. For technical details, see our manual https://www.ghielectronics.com/downloads/ALFAT/ALFAT_SoC_Processor_User_Manual.pdf Look for the section on UART interfacing.

A simple ASCII command protocol. For instance, to find out the amount of free space on the SD Card, the uC would transmit to ALFAT:

K M:

ALFAT would transmit to uC

!00
$00000000717F0000
!00

There are 1904148480 free bytes

All of the above are readable ASCII characters.
For a very quick way to get started, I would suggest you use the ALFAT Evaluation Kit. For a list of other useful resources, go to our online catalog page for “ALFAT 2 SoC Processor” and click on the Resources tab.

Thanks Jeff,

I bought the ALFAT evaluation Kit. Hopefully I will have a good Christmas by way of finding my data logging solution. Have a great Holiday, and keep looking for my posts, like I said, I’m new to this type of circuitry.

Steve

@ Bad Steve - You will be happy!

The learning curve on ALFAT, especially when considering using the UART interface, is actually quite small. Once you start playing with the Explorer software, you’ll see what I mean.

We are here to help ;D