Arduino SD Card Reader

I recently had a project that required having multiple files that were used to control an animatronics display. Each file was a scene for the display and the code simply would play 1 scene, pause, and then play the next scene.

I used the Adafruit MicroSD card breakout board. This assembly is inexpensive, works with in either 3V or 5V systems, and has an SPI interface. A standard Arduino SD library was used for access. I used the MicroSD card with both a Nano and ESP32.

The SD library supports FAT16/FAT32 file structures. So preparing the microSD card with the file used a Windows 10 computer with a SD reader. The card was formatted and the files were copied.

Accessing the files were simplified using the Arduino SD library. Using root (declared as File) that was pointed to the root directory (“/”) the openNextFile() method was used to get the next filename to use. When we were at the end of the directory, a rewindDirectory() was performed. The filename was then checked for the correct extension.

showFile = root.openNextFile();   // get next file
if (!showFile) {                  // end of directory start over
  root.rewindDirectory();         // beginning
  showFile = root.openNextFile(); // file
}
filename = showFile.name();       // check filename ends in ".BIN"
filename.trim();                  // remove whitespace
filename.toUpperCase();           // all upper case
if(filename.endsWith(".BIN")) {   // check for bin file
  break;    // found good file  
}
else {
  showFile.close();               // close unneeded file
}

Bytes were read from the file using the read() method. It should be noted that the documentation states that EOF is returned at the end of the file. Actually the number of bytes read is returned. When the value is zero (0), then the end of file was encountered.

I used the microSD card with both a Nano (5V) and ESP32 (3V3) and worked without any issues on both systems. For my application I had to read a small buffer (3 bytes) at a 30 frames per second rate (33.3 milli-seconds).