CODEWITHSUNDEEP
streamembeddedzipmicrocontrollergzipstream
Ehsan Khodarahmi
Ehsan Khodarahmi

Reputation: 4922

Zip stream implementation with C in embedded devices

I have to embed a large text file in the limited space of internal memory of a MCU. This MCU will use the content of the text file for some purposes later.
The memory limitation dos not allow me to embed file content directly in my code (suppose that I use a character array to store file content), but if I compress the content of the file (using a light-weight algorithm like zip or gzip) then everything would be OK.
Suppose that the MCU uses getBytes(i, len) function to read content of my array (where i is index of the begining of required byte & len is length of data to be readed), Here the problem is that when I compress the content & store it on the device(in my character array) I can't use getBytes function anymore for getting target data, so if I can write a wrapper on top of the getBytes function to map compressed content to requested content, then my problem will be solve.
I've no processing limitation on the MCU, anymore the memory amount is limited, & as I know access to the content of a zip compressed file is sequential, so I don't know is it possible to do this in an acceptable manner using C or C++ in such environment?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1519

Answers (1)

Akhil
Akhil

Reputation: 344

It is definitely possible to do this in a simple and efficient manner.

However, it's better to use piecewise compression (at the expense of compression ratio) instead of compressing/decompressing the entire file at once, otherwise you need to store the entire decompressed file in RAM.

With a small piece, the compression ratio of a strong algorithm will not be much different from a relatively weak one. So I recommend using a simple compression algorithm.

Disk compression algorithms are best suited for such purposes as they are designed to compress/decompress blocks.

Upvotes: 2

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