Is it possible to log Time/Date stamp to SD card with Picaxe?

O

oKors

New Member
Unfortunately home improvements have kept me from making any forward progress on my electronics projects. I'd like to come back to this topic though because ultimately this is where I'd really like the direction of my project to go.

A bit of background:
I’ve been working on a PIR/Counter circuit which works well and I’ve finally released it into the wild to do its duty. Basically it detects motion and the HI from the PIR increments a counter (found HERE). I’ve also added a reset button.
For now I’ve omitted the 08M chip and just ran the counter directly from the PIR. Reason being is because I wanted to field test the PIR for reliability without adding any unnecessary complexity to the package.

So here’s my ultimate goal. I’d like to record statistical “usage” data with this counter. What I envision is when the PIR detects motion it will not only increment the counter (still necessary for a visual check) but also log a Time/Date stamp to an SD card. I could then pull the SD card out and plug it into the PC and get a .txt file from it which I can open in Excel. This text file should have a number of rows, each showing a unique time stamp of when the counter was triggered.

Please understand, this is a very ambitious goal for me because I’m very new at BASIC and I've really only written one or two practice programs.
Also, I’ve seen lots of hardware out there that “looks” like it would do the job but again, I don’t know enough about the hardware or how to program it to make any educated purchases.

Just doing a bit of hardware research I've come up with what looks like the right ingredients:
  • I’d probably need a Real-Time clock chip to keep time; like this maybe?
  • Then a SD card interface or SD card data logger, like THIS or THIS

Hardware: am I even close? Again, I'm more or less guessing that these components would work. If someone has a different idea, please... do chime in.

As far as code goes... sheesh, I'm scared. Would it be totally rude of me to ask if someone could put something together for me? Once I can see it I'm sure I can make modifications.
If that's an inappropriate request I understand.

I still have the code I used when my plan was to run the PIR through an 08M (I can post that later since I'm not at home right now).
 
O

oKors

New Member
Technical said:
If you are willing to use a thumb drive instead of sd card you could use this:
http://www.techsupplies.co.uk/epages/Store.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/Store.TechSupplies/Products/USB031
Click to expand...
That could work.
The idea being, the storage device (a thumb drive in this case) would be hot swappable. Since this will be outdoors and only checked on once a month or so I'd swap in a blank drive, take the one from the device home to DL the data, save the data, format the drive and use it to swap back in next time I go out to the site.

May be more cost affective to buy a couple USB thumb drives rather than monster, multi-gig, SD cards anyway.
An SD card would be a cleaner look but... :rolleyes:
 
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