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Paperwork.
It’s like being forced to add water to cheese puffs and then eat them.
Paperwork isn’t like some jerk you can avoid - it seeks you out, tracks you down, and makes you scavenge for a pen that isn’t dried out.
It gets mailed to me, sent home with my kids, and practically stapled to my forehead anytime I have an appointment anywhere.
Talk about removing the luster of adult life.
But the worst part is having to manage certain varieties of paperwork.
It’s not that I can’t appreciate some documents are important, it’s just keeping track of them feels like my soul being put in a trash compactor.
But I have finally landed on a file system that has served me well the last couple of years.
I have three large brown-speckled accordion looking folders; respectively labeled “taxes”, “kids”, and “everything else”.
That’s it.
Come tax season, I know where to look.
Where are the kids pictures from school my wife asks? Here, in this folder labeled “kids”.
What about so and so documents? That’s right, the “everything else” folder.
Did you know there is also a file system you can use with microcontrollers?
There are actually a few, but the one that I am thinking about is called SPIFFS. (It’s arguably better then my folders 😀)
SPIFFS stands for Serial Peripheral Interface Flash File System.
It takes a little wrapping one’s head around, but once you get the basic idea, it can be pretty handy for storing log files, sensor data, or any number of things.
These are files that will persist even after the board loses power.
We have a comprehensive guide on using SPIFFS with the ESP32 which includes lots of code examples, you can check it out here.
Programming Electronics Academy members, if you want to get familiar with using the ESP32, check out the WiFi Thermometer or the ChatGPT terminal project.
Not a member yet? Sign up here.
SPIFFS might not save you from the drudgery of paperwork, but if you ever need to save some files on your microcontroller, you’ll want to check it out.
All the best!
-Michael Cheich
Programming Electronics Academy
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