I have spent the last day connecting my new micro-drive from 4d systems to my Arduino. The chip allows you to access a file system on a micro-sd card from a micro controller such as the AVR. It will be a part of my weather station, and will be used to log data. Since the 168 only has one real serial port (which is used to program it) you need to use software serial. I just got it working and wanted to give a few pointers on some issues I had while doing this.
-Use the newsoftserial library. It is much better than the original software serial library. It can be found here
- Make sure your Arduino is outputting 3.3 volts on the digital pins not 5. I suggest the Seeduino, which allows you to change from 3.3 to 5 volts with the flick of a switch.
-Be sure you are using myserial.print(U, BYTE); and define U as int U = 0x55;. There are so many print options which print in different forms (HEX, BYTE, CHAR) it can get confusing.
Here is a shortprogram to test connecting to the micro-drive. Connect to the Arduino at 57600 and send c for connect l and for status. I am off to implement writing files.
