New Brick Controller

I have been working on a new Brick Controller Design.  The intention is to upgrade the current design for

• TYPE-C interface
• More 9VDC power for the motors
• New LED controller for up to 10 LEDs
• BT Interface

Option add on board

• MP3 Player with audio amp
• USB Mass storage for storing the MP3 file.

After studying this  for a while, I became concerned that a PIC18F was not going to have the horsepower to do all of this.  Plus the latest Microchip libraries are pushing towards the PIC32.  So I started with a PIC32 development board, PIC32MX Curiosity and some Mikroe Click Boards.  First thing was tho get the development board to look like a USB MSD.  There was an example of this using a Click micro USB SD card.  This came up very easily and worked like it was supposed to.  But I didnt really want to put in an SD card when I only need about 5MB of storage for the MP3 file.

So I moved on to a Click Flash with a SST26VF064 on it.  This gives just under 8MB, which should be enough.  However the PIC32 Harmony framework only supports SST25 (now discontinued) on SPI. There is a SST26 driver for SQI.  However, the PIC32MX does not have inherent SQI.  Trying to get this working has been frustrating and from reading the forums, I am not alone.  I have the SST25 driver modified and I can see the correct initialization sequence on the scope, but reading has proven to be illusive.  I will say this, if I ever get this to work, I intend to post the project here so other people dont have to go through what I did.