So has anyone here...

[The_Don125]

...programmed an AVR so many times that the flash/EEPROM ran out of stable rewrite cycles?

[Sokkan]

No.

Not yet...

But I have been thinking of the possibility. I have one x0xb0x that is my testbench that I reprogram all the time when testing stuff. It must have been flashed at least 100 times, probably a lot more.

[eil]

This is more of a x0xb0x question, but it's so strongly related to this thread, that I'll ask here.

When you power up the x0xb0x, it remembers the tempo from last time. How often does it save the tempo to EEPROM (or the AVR's flash) and would that significantly decrease the life span of the chip?

[eil]

Well, yes, but I meant more specifically. It is saved on every click of the encoder or once every 30 seconds or what?

[adafruit]

every time the encoder is moved. i think eeprom has something like 10k or 100k rewrite cycles. im not too worried about it, at worst the tempo will be wrong when you start up

[magician13134]

I know that before I knew about write/rewrite cycle limits, I wrote a piece of software that rewrote an EEPROM variable *every time* the program looped (and it was a pretty darn tight loop). I have since changed that, but I'm still using that chip, no problems.

[darus67]

I know from real life experience that it is possible to burn out flash memory.

I was involved in the testing and debugging of a product that had embedded linux running
from a flash memory system. We found out the hard way that if we turned the event logging
all the way up, it would overwrite the log files often enough that after a number of weeks
the flash memory would start failing. Fortunately, we were using CF memory cards, so it
wasn't a huge deal to replace the flash.