USB mass storage working with Vinculum chip

Thu, Aug 20 2009
Posted by Jonathan Oxer With lots of assistance from Marc I now have an Arduino Mega connected to a Vinculum USB host chip on a VDIP1 breakout board, with the Mega running a little monitor program that lets me type filesystem commands and have it execute them on an attached memory stick. Yes, that's an MP3 player I'm using as a memory stick. The first 3 memory sticks I tried failed! Many hours were wasted chasing problems that didn't actually exist when the memory sticks were dodgy, but once I had one that the Vinculum chip was happy to talk to it was all smooth sailing. Full FAT32 support, and from the Arduino I can get a directory listing, create / delete directories, change directory, create / delete / open / close / write / read files, check disk space, etc. The Vinculum chip is nice enough to report events like insertion and removal of the memory stick, so you can have the program on the Arduino detect insertion of a stick and do appropriate things, and also detect removal. Many, many possibilities opened up by this. I'm using it in the car datalogging project but I can already think of a heap of other uses. Hmmm, time to fire up Eagle and do a USB memory stick shield I think!