On Thu, 16 Dec 1999, Brent Brown wrote:
> Martin McCormick wrote:
> >         This is almost not [O.T.] because this could be a fabulous way for
> > PIC's to use large amounts of memory for data logging and huge buffers.  A
> > couple of things need to happen for the fun to start.  We need a fixture
> > that can hold a memory stick and bring out the connections to a set of
> > pins that we could either mount on a circuit board or wire wrap to.

And you'd better have a license from SONY to use their devices.

Sony zealously protects their 'proprietary' protocols as the people who
made a Winblows based CD jukebox program painfully found out. They reverse
engineered the protocols, and were selling a program that could control the
Sony and Pioneer juke boxes via a PC serial port. Sony sent them
a 'cease and desist' order, and after many months of trying to get Sony to
license them the use of the SIRC protocols, they gave up and yanked Sony
support from the software. (Sony wanted ridiculous $$$ for the license).
Sony really lost on this one since their jukeboxes were the most popular
mates to the program. This was more than 2 years ago, and things may have
changed since then.

> Absolutely, I aggree with the possibilities for PIC use, but my vote
> would be for the SmartMedia(TM) card format instead. Take a look
> at the Toshiba web site at some of their devices.

And what is Toshiba's licensing position?

These days its all about 'Intellectual Property' protection. You can't use
GIF's today without infringing on Unisys's patent (broswer/viewer writers
just pay Unisys the royalty), so how are things EVER going to incrementally
improve now?

> In my opinion, these things are used by more digital camera
> manufacturers and are therefore more available, and should be a
> strong contender for long survival in the market amongst other
> contenders. 32MByte cards you can buy now at retail stores,
> 128Mbyte shouldn't be too far away, the connectors too I think are
> not too hard to get hold of. The electrical specs you can pick up
> from a Toshiba data sheet. Looks pretty easy.

And you won't be behovin to a sole source and their higher prices. Why did
Beta fail, even though it was a technically superior technology (7 M/s head
speed vs 4.8 M/s for VHS= 45% wider bandwidth)? Because Sony charged a LOT
more for their licensing. BetaHiFI was MUCH better than VHS-HiFI (I
modified BetaHiFimachines to get 50kHz bandwidth on their AFM channels but
couldn't do better than 15kHz on VHS because of the head switching noise),
but again the license fees shrank the market.

> The only thing difficult might be making it data format compatible
> with other SmartMedia(TM) systems as this is covered by a
> SSFDC forum specification which I think requires money to join.
> The advantage then would be you could take the card out of your
> PIC based datalogger, voice recorder, or whatever, and slip it into a
> 3.5" floppy adaptor and read it on your PC.

That would certainly be a good way to go. Multivendor support and easy
user interfacing.

I too think that SmartMedia is the better way to go since it gets you
away from the sole-source problem, and licensing headaches.

Robert
--Robert.Rolf@UAlberta.ca
"If 'debugging' is the process of removing errors, then 'programming' must
be the process of putting them in".