Quote:
Originally Posted by shortcircuit
THANKS DJ!
I was thinking of the Arduino because I saw a shield that would read an SD card (and give me some memory for variables like ramp-up speed, and maybe even thermal cutout time)
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The software to read and write SD cards is a bit complicated. You'll definitely want to use one of the processors with more memory, and a pre-written library.
You won't be able to run programs from the SD card. Programs have to be first copied to the internal flash, which is a pretty slow process.
The Arduino boards all come with a small bootloader program that runs right after reset to check if you want to download a new program. If there isn't a download request, it jumps to the user program. This works pretty well for updates, but you do have to check that it won't screw up your control. The bootloader sets all of the OCR1A/B/C pins to outputs, which might command full throttle for one or two seconds.
The AVR processors all have small EEPROM memories which is where operational parameters are usually saved.