nicsure

RT-880's SPI Flash is weak.

Added 2025-07-30 22:19:56 +0000 UTC

SPI Flash Memory Limitations on the RT-880

One of the big challenges with the RT-880 is its SPI flash memory chip, it has a fairly limited write endurance, rated at just 100,000 write cycles. Once that limit is reached, the radio becomes essentially unusable.

To work around this, I’ll need to take a pretty aggressive approach to minimizing writes to flash. The typical strategy in situations like this is deferred writing: changes are stored temporarily in RAM and only written to flash after a period of inactivity say, 10 seconds. This helps, but during long sessions with frequent frequency updates, it can still wear the chip out faster than I’d like.

This is something I’m honestly a bit paranoid about. The RT-900 handled this better thanks to its software-controlled power switch, I could detect when the device was being turned off and flush the buffer before shutdown. The 880, unfortunately, uses a hard power switch, so there's no warning before shutdown and no chance to flush RAM cleanly.

For now, the 10-second deferred write window will stay as the default, it's not ideal, but without a dedicated "Shut Down" detection, there’s no better solution.

That said, I’m planning to make the deferred write interval configurable in the advanced menu. This way, users who aren’t too worried about flash wear can set it to something short (like 2 seconds), while others looking to maximize hardware lifespan can opt for a longer interval — say, 5 minutes — and just use a shutdown feature properly when available.