> From: John Walshe [mailto:John.Walshe@INPACTMICRO.COM] > I've been watching the IDE interface thread with interest but it looks now > ready to stop, but leaves me with an unanswered question. What about the > file system. How difficult is it to convert the data returned by the drive > into a file that makes sense. Does the drive look after the linking of the > sectors to make the file or how is all that done. In your opinion where is > the best place to get a good explanation of the file system (my PC uses > Fat32 - I think - must check). I have been working on an microcontroller ide project for some time now and it should be ready for display pretty soon. I think I am going about it a different way though : My 877, tiny bit of external ram and firmware is designed to be a complete ide and filesystem implementation with a friendly programming interface, so you could for intance read and write files using your 16f84s. The whole firmware is written in a very modular way, so you could take the ide module, the fat16 module and the spi module, compile that and flash the chip for one project, or ide, fat32 and i2c for a different project. I hope to implement more filesystems if the board becomes popular- ntfs, ext2 etc.. but I havent looked into the specifics of either of those yet. Do you think an off the shelf ide and filesystem would be a hit? or am I just writing this for myself :) -- Jon "I should check out the olimex competition" Baker -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.