FRAM Breakout - Adafruit New Product

We all know the Spark Core is lacking in the memory department for most projects.

I know others are working on SD Card and FRAM breakouts which is great.

Here is a new Breakout from Adafruit if you need to add FRAM.

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Decent price but not after shipping :smiley:

And a I2C version https://www.adafruit.com/products/1895

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@kennethlimcp Just buy $200 worth of them and shipping is FREE :smile:

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@rwb do you need my address? :smiley:

It’s cool for initial development but a shield makes it more stable since it’s a rather fast transmission and those jumpers might cause an issue IMO :slight_smile:

Yea I’m just joking :smile: A shield is certainly better than this breakout if your working with the Spark Core.

@RWB, @kennethlimcp I need me an FRAM shield or breakout ASAP so I can develop the display buffer concept I have been thinking of. @kennethlimcp, when will you FRAM/SD shield be ready for prime time? :smile:

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@peekay123 Which Adafruit one you want?

Arrgghhh! I can’t get those breakouts directly in Canada! @RWB I need the SPI modules since they are the fastest. I could port a library for you if you sent me a few (in case something happens) of them! I can’t move forward on the Sharp Mem display buffer without those or @kennethlimcp great shields!

@peekay123 whats the deal with not being able to get them in Canada? I can’t have 2 shipped to you?

@RWB, what I mean is that I can’t find them locally.

I emailed will and mohit about the pcb files I need to generate for production.

Give me some more buffer time :slight_smile:

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@peekay123 I got 3 of the SPI FRAM chips heading your way from Adafruit. They should be there Wednesday or Thursday of next week.

Have fun!

@RWB, you rock! I can’t wait to start looking at that display buffer concept using SPI DMA. Dude, I owe you one :wink:

@peekay123 The custom Font hack was all worth it honestly.

Getting the Sharp Memory LCD up and working with the Spark Core is something I’m sure I’ll use in a future product so its well worth the investment.

I would like to see how low power we can make the spark core by having it only access the internet every so often to update data via Wifi and then refresh the Sharp Memory LCD which will say on 24/7 like the Pebble Watches.

@RWB, I am working on doing a power profile of the Spark with the existing sleep modes. I’ll be sharing my findings when I’m done. I have a project where my core sleeps 1 minute, wakes, reads some sensors and does a publish of the data and then goes into deep sleep for another minute. I am trying to measure the power profile of the spark when it wakes (wifi/cloud connect and publish) so I can figure overall power consumption.

@peekay123 That’s data that will be useful to lots of different people. Keep up the good work. I’m looking forward to your data.

@RWB, check out:

I got the Adafruit I2C FRAM breakout running under CoOS on my spark today as part of testing a new I2C driver I’ve been developing. Still a lot of testing to be done yet, but Read with DMA and interrupts seem to be working well. I have implemented Fast (400 KHz) and Ultra Fast (1000 KHz) along with the Standard (100 KHz), Adafruit uses the Fujitsu FRAM that supports Ultra Fast and I was pleasantly surprised to find the F103 did as well, even though that is undocumented.

Anyway, I ran a few read performance tests by reading 256 Kbytes of data (256 byte read x 1024 times)

100 KHz - 23,73 seconds or just over 10 Kbytes per second
400 KHz - 5.998 seconds or just over 44 Kbytes per second
1000 KHz - 2.444 seconds or just over 100 Kbytes per second.

AS I said, still a lot of testing left to do. I want to do a Spi driver along the same lines, as well Then I’ll clean it all up, write documentation and post it all on spark.hackster.io. (next month sometime hopefully).

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@pra, that is fantastic! @timb is working on a I2C library for the core and it may be worth working with him since you are so advanced!

I have been testing the SPI version of that breakout and it flies at 18Mhz (DIV4) but stops there since the part is not rated for 36Mhz (DIV2). I will be doing some speed test in the coming days. :smile: