FatFs
More info
- Creator
- ChaN
- Type
- Library
- License
- BSD-style (1-clause)
- Website
- elm-chan.org
The one-person Japanese library that lets nearly every microcontroller on earth read an SD card formatted on a PC.
Written by the developer known as ChaN in portable, dependency-free C. It handles FAT12/16/32 and, since 2016, exFAT. It knows nothing about hardware: you supply a thin layer of disk_read, disk_write and a few friends, and the rest just works. That is why it turns up inside STM32Cube, ESP-IDF and countless data loggers.
Choosing FAT is rarely a technical decision; it is a social one. It is the only format Windows, macOS and a camera all read without complaint. The price is poor tolerance of power loss, so internal flash usually gets LittleFS, and FatFs is kept for the SD card that has to leave the device.