collapseos/recipes/rc2014/sdcard

Accessing a MicroSD card

Status: work in progress.

SD cards are great because they are accessible directly. No supporting IC is necessary. The easiest way to access them is through the SPI protocol.

Due to the way IO works in z80, implementing SPI through it as a bit awkward: You can't really keep pins high and low on an IO line. You need some kind of intermediary between z80 IOs and SPI.

There are many ways to achieve this. This recipe explains how to build your own hacked off SPI relay for the RC2014. It can then be used with sdc.asm to drive a SD card.

Goal

Read and write to a SD card from Collapse OS using a SPI relay of our own design.

Gathering parts

• A RC2014 with Collapse OS with these features:
  • shell
  • blockdev
  • sdc
• A MicroSD breakout board. I use Adafruit's.
• A proto board + header pins with 39 positions so we can make a RC2014 card.
• Diodes, resistors and stuff
• 40106 (Inverter gates)
• 4011 (NAND gates)
• 74xx139 (Decoder)
• 74xx161 (Binary counter)
• 74xx165 (Parallel input shift register)
• 74xx595 (Shift register)

Building the SPI relay

The schematic supplied with this recipe works well with sdc.asm. Of course, it's not the only possible design that works, but I think it's one of the most straighforwards.

The basic idea with this relay is to have one shift register used as input, loaded in parallel mode from the z80 bus and a shift register that takes the serial input from MISO and has its output wired to the z80 bus.

These two shift registers are clocked by a binary counter that clocks exactly 8 times whenever a write operation on port 4 occurs. Those 8 clocks send data we've just received in the 74xx165 into MOSI and get MISO into the 74xx595.

The 74xx139 then takes care of activating the right ICs on the right combinations of IORQ/WR/RD/Axx.

The rest of the ICs is fluff around this all.

My first idea was to implement the relay with an AVR microcontroller to minimize the number of ICs, but it's too slow. We have to be able to respond within 300ns! Following that, it became necessary to add a 595 and a 165, but if we're going to add that, why not go the extra mile and get rid of the microcontroller?

To that end, I was heavily inspired by this design.

This board uses port 4 for SPI data, port 5 to pull CS low and port 6 to pull it high. Port 7 is unused but monopolized by the card.

Little advice: If you make your own design, double check propagation delays! Some NAND gates, such as the 4093, are too slow to properly respond within a 300ns limit. For example, in my own prototype, I use a 4093 because that's what I have in inventory. For the CS flip-flop, the propagation delay doesn't matter. However, it does matter for the SELECT line, so I don't follow my own schematic with regards to the M1 and A2 lines and use two inverters instead.

Building the kernel

To be able to work with your SPI relay and communicate with the card, you should have glue code that looks like this.

Initially, when you don't know if things work well yet, you should comment out the block creation part.

Reading from the SD card

The first thing we'll do is fill the SD card's first 12 bytes with "Hello World!":

echo "Hello World!" > /dev/sdX

Then, insert your SD card in your SPI relay and boot the RC2014.

Run the sdci command which will initialize the card. The blockdev 0 is already selected at initialization, but you could, to be sure, run bsel 0 to select the first blockdev, which is configured to be the sd card.

Set your memory pointer to somewhere you can write to with mptr 9000 and then you're ready to load your contents with load d (load the 13 bytes that you wrote to your sd card earlier. You can then peek d and see that your "Hello World!\n" got loaded in memory!

Mounting a filesystem from the SD card

The Makefile compiles helo.asm in cfsin and then packs cfsin into a CFS filesystem into the sdcard.cfs file. That can be mounted by Collapse OS!

$ cat sdcard.cfs > /dev/sdX

Then, you insert your SD card in your SPI relay and go:

Collapse OS
> sdci
> fson
> fls
helo
hello.txt
> helo
Hello!
>

The helo command is a bit magical and is due to the hook implemented in pgm.asm: when an unknown command is typed, it looks in the currently mounted filesystem for a file with the same name. If it finds it, it loads it in memory at a predefined place (in our case, 0x9000) and executes it.

Now let that sink in for a minute. You've just mounted a filesystem on a SD card, loaded a file from it in memory and executed that file, all that on a kernel that weights less than 3 kilobytes!

Writing to a file in the SD card

Now what we're going to do is to write back to a file on the SD card. From a system with the SD card initialized and the FS mounted, do:

> fopn 0 hello.txt
> bsel 1
> mptr 9000
9000
> load d
> peek d
48656C6C6F20576F726C64210A

Now that we have our "Hello World!\n" loaded in memory, let's modify it and make it start with "XXX" and save it to the file. sdcf flushes the current SD card buffer to the card. It's automatically ran whenever we change sector during a read/write/seek, but was can also explicitly call it with sdcf.

> poke 3
[type "XXX"]
> peek d
5858586C6F20576F726C64210A
> seek 00 0000
0000
> save d
> sdcf

The new "XXXlo World!\n" is now written to the card, at its proper place in CFS! You can verify this by pulling out the card (no need to unmount it from Collapse OS, but if you insert it again, you'll need to run sdci again), insert it in your modern system and run:

$ head -c 512 /dev/sdX | xxd

You'll see your "XXXlo World!\n" somewhere, normally at offset 0x120!