[sdiy] a provoking question about time

rburnett at richieburnett.co.uk rburnett at richieburnett.co.uk
Thu Jun 23 14:18:09 CEST 2022


Roman are you talking about "bit rot" in the program Flash of dsPICs?  
Can you remember the part number of the devices that you observed the 
issue with?

-Richie,


On 2022-06-23 13:02, Tom Wiltshire wrote:
> Could you instead assume some "average number of boot-ups per year"
> and then re-write the memory at start-up after the chip has booted up
> X times?
> 
> For some people who leave the thing in the cupboard for years, it
> won't help them, but then again, if they pull it out of the cupboard
> after 15 years and it doesn't work, they're not exactly going to be
> surprised. For everyone else, it might be enough. For regular users,
> it might write the memory more than necessary, but it wouldn't be
> frequently enough to really shorten the lifespan.
> 
> HTH,
> Tom
> 
> ==================
>        Electric Druid
> Synth & Stompbox DIY
> ==================
> 
> 
> 
>> On 23 Jun 2022, at 10:34, Roman Sowa <modular at go2.pl> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello,
>> what are your concerns about flash retention time in microcontrollers? 
>> Usually PIC18 and PIC16 claim 40 years in datasheet, but dsPIC only 
>> 20.
>> I've seen corrupted memory in products made about 15 years ago with 
>> dsPIC, so datasheet value seems real.
>> 
>> One way to do it is to rewrite all memory from time to time, but how 
>> to do that? Even if there's real time clock running, the user may 
>> always change the date, and if it's not alowed, the battery or 
>> supercapacitor may die, or get ripped away. My idea is to clearly 
>> state somewhere, in manual, or on the device "please run maintenance 
>> procedure if it's year ending with 0 or 5" but I'm affraid nobody will 
>> do that anyway, and it seems foolish.
>> 
>> People have no problem giving their cars every year for expensive 
>> maintenance, but nearly nobody ever does that with non-industrial 
>> electronic equipment. That goes sligltly better with musical 
>> instruments, but anyway many of them go to service only after it's too 
>> late and it's simply broken.
>> 
>> I'm not very fond of general trend which is "buy new stuff every 2 
>> years".
>> 
>> Roman
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> 
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