SparkFun Electronics Forum

Anyone toying around with the idea of talking to a SDIO WiFi Card or know any links for doing such ?

which board are you using?

are you able to get the SD slot working for just the flash memory first?
That would come before the idea of trying to implement the wifi card.

i am using the LPC2148 board.
i have gotten the SD slot to work, just wanted to see if there was any work being done on talking to the WIFI SD card and see how much i may be getting over my head on it.

My board is based on s3c2410, and its os is wince.net 4.2. I can use sd wifi card in it.

thanks, but i want to stay away from anything windows based

Hi there!

any news regarding ARM & SDIO-WiFi? I am particularly interested in a solution *without* OS at all; no Linux, no Windows, etc. Does anyone know of a project / stack that talks to SDIO cards "directly" ??

Spectec is offering a line of **tiny** WLAN cards; those would be terrific to connect to a microcontroller

http://www.spectec.com.tw/wlan.htm

Thanks! Jorg

The biggest problem is getting the low-level commands to drive the WiFi card as most vendors will supply drivers for Windows CE, etc. but not give out these sort of details. If anyone knows of a good SDIO WiFi card (that supports 802.11g also) AND knows the command set for it then half the battle is won. IIRC SDIO only uses the SPI mode (two data lines) and not the SD Card interface (4 data lines) so driving it will be fairly easy. The hard part will be writing a TCP/IP stack but it is do-able and there are plenty of free stacks with source code around

I'm actually working on getting the API from Spectec right now for a more commercial aspect. If its within the "rules" then I will see about getting you guys the code.

I'm actually working on getting the API from Spectec right now for a more commercial aspect. If its within the "rules" then I will see about getting you guys the code

I wish you well, we have worked with them before and they were not much help, i hope you have better luck with them.

I also wish you well! Even if the license does not allow open source projects (which is quite likely), maybe you can publish (or sell!) a binary driver for other systems?
Definitely, please, keep us (me?) up to date, I am still very interested. I have purchased one of their mini SDIO cards, but of course Linux doesn't recognize it properly According to their web pages, drivers exist only for WinCE ...

J

I'm still trying to get it, but in the mean time, I'm reverse engineering

There are 11 functions inside the DLL file...

DriverEntry at 0x000040F4
NDL_Close at 0x00004FE8
NDL_Deinit at 0x0000FE90
NDL_IOControl at 0x00004FAC
NDL_Init at 0x00004EE8
NDL_Open at 0x00004FB4
NDL_PowerDown at 0x00004FB8
NDL_PowerUp at 0x00004FCC
NDL_Read at 0x00004FD0
NDL_Seek at 0x00004FD8
NDL_Write at 0x00004FE0

The DLL depends on 3 other DLL files:
1) NDIS.DLL
2) COREDLL.DLL
3) CEDDK.DLL


It actually looks like the driver was written by a company called MediaTek (also in Taiwan) for a product called MT5911 (which I can't find on their website). I've disassembled the DLL file and its pretty straight forward, I'll just need to get my assembler book out and see what's actually going on.

the marvel 88w8385 is supported with sdio mode in the current linux kernel (libertas driver). a number of 8385 based modules are available on the net:

http://www.zcomax.com/embedded/XG-180MU/XG-180MU-DS.pdf

i got the control register data sheet from spectec on their WLAN-11B SD card. in that data sheet they talk allot about CMD52 or CMD53 but provide no info about it. anyone else able to at least talk to this cards registers yet ?

ok, i got the CMD52 thing figured out.
does anyone know the bit format for the card ? it looks like its 48 bits per command. the data sheet does not specify whether i should shoot out 8 bits at a time using the CS pin for each write or i should just bring the CS pin low and shoot out the 48 bits then bring high.

Man, it seems like im the only guy interested in this SDIO-WiFi card stuff.

Anyhosel, i am now at least getting responces back from the card now.