Erik - / USBFileSystem

Class that combined FATFileSystem with a USBMSD device, similar to LocalFileSystem

Dependencies:   USBDevice

Dependents:   SD_USB_FS_HelloWorld S25FL216K_USBFileSystem USBFileSystem_RAMDISK_HelloWorld

Introduction

USBFileSystem is a combination of FATFileSystem and USB-MSD (Mass-Storage Device). This way it allows you to create a filesystem that is both accessible on your PC with the USB cable plugged in, and on the device itself. This is very similar to LocalFileSystem, only you can use any Serial Flash, SD, etc as storage medium.

If your code works with either FATFileSystem or USBMSD it will with very little modification also work with USBFileSystem.

Basic functionality

Since both FATFileSystem and USBMSD write binary data to a the storage medium, if both are writing somewhere at the same time we have a problem. This library makes the medium read only for the local side, if USB is writing, and vice versa. Local is considered to be writing as long as you have opened a file for write. USB is considered writing as soon as a write command comes from USB, and this continues for a short time after the last write command. This is needed because I cannot know when the last sector is written by USB, so I have to wait a little while to see if more data is written.

USB MSD on your PC

When you write to / read from a USB drive Windows (and I expect other OS's too) will cache everything. The result is that once you read a file on your PC, it will never change, even if your mbed does change the data. And if you write/delete a file when the mbed is locally using the file system, it will be read only, however your PC will tell you data was succesfully written/removed.

If this is a problem for your device, you can disconnect the USB part when the mbed is writing to the storage medium locally. The library can do this automatically for you.

Required code

The virtual functions that need to be implemented by you are:

virtual int disk_initialize() { return 0; }
virtual int _disk_status() { return 0; }
virtual int disk_read(uint8_t * buffer, uint64_t sector) { return 0;}
virtual int _disk_write(const uint8_t * buffer, uint64_t sector) = 0;
virtual int disk_sync() { return 0; }
virtual uint64_t disk_sectors() = 0;

Some of those are optional, but disk_read, _disk_write and disk_sectors have to be defined in the child class.

Available functions for the user

The USBFileSystem library allows for some extra functions the user can use. The API documentation lists them, but summarized: You can attach functions which are called once either USB is writing to the storage medium, or when this is done locally. There are two functions which will tell you if currently USB/local is writing to the storage medium, and you can set the usbMode. Set it to mode 0 and USB is read only when the storage is used locally, set it to mode 1 and it is disconnected (default and recommended).

Besides that there are of course the standard USB functions (connect/disconnect for example), and you can use 'fopen', 'mkdir', etc similar to FATFileSystem.

Hello World

Currently available:

RAM-disk for KL25Z and LPC1768 (this one disappeared for some reason, I re-published it, should still work):

Wi-Go serial flash:

SD card (different from others):

Note that this one is not mine, if you have problems with it check if there are updates for the library.