Arduino: Lightweight compression algorithm to store data in EEPROM

Question

I want to store a large amount of data onto my Arduino with a ATmega168/ATmega328 microcontroller, but unfortunately there's only 256 KB / 512 KB of EEPROM storage.

My idea is to make use of an compression algorithm to strip down the size. But well, my knowledge on compression algorithms is quite low and my search for ready-to-use libraries failed.

So, is there a good way to optimize the storage size?

Answer 1

You might have a look at the LZO algorithm, which is designed to be lightweight. I don't know whether there are any implementations for the AVR system, but it might be something you could implement yourself.

You may be somewhat misinformed about the amount of storage available in EEPROM on your chip though; according to the datasheet I have the EEPROM sizes are:

ATmega48P: 256
ATmega88P: 512
ATmega168P: 512
ATmega256P: 1024

Note that those values are in bytes, not KB as you mention in your question. This is not, by any measure, a "shitload".

Answer 2

AVRs only have a few kilobytes of EEPROM at the most, and very few have many more than 64K Flash (no standard Arduinos do).

If you are needing to store something and seldom modify, for instance an image, you could try using the Flash as there is much more space there to work with. For simple images, some crude RLE encoding would go a long way.

Compressing anything more random, for instance logged data, audio, etc, will take a tremendous amount of overhead for the AVR, you will have better luck getting a serial EEPROM chip to hold this data. Arduino's site has a page on interfacing with a 64K chip, which sounds . If you want more than that, look at interfacing with a SD card with SPI, for instance in this audio shield

Answer 3

A NASA study here (Postscript)

A repost of 1989 article on LZW here

Keep it simple and perform analysis of the cost/payout of adding compression. This includes time and effort, complexity, resource usage, data compressibility, etc.

Answer 4

An algorithm something like LZSS would probably be a good choice for an embedded platform. They are simple algorithms, and don't need much memory.

LZS is one I'm familiar with. It uses a 2 kB dictionary for compression and decompression (the dictionary is the most recent 2 kB of the uncompressed data stream). (LZS was patented by HiFn, however as far as I can tell, all patents have expired.)

But I see that an ATmega328, used on recent Arduinos, only has 512 bytes to 2 kB SRAM, so maybe even LZS is too big for it. I'm sure you could use a variant with a smaller dictionary, but I'm not sure what compression ratios you'd achieve.

Answer 5

The method described in the paper “Data Compression Algorithms for Energy-Constrained Devices in Delay Tolerant Networks” might run on an ATmega328.

Reference: C. Sadler and M. Martonosi, “Data Compression Algorithms for Energy-Constrained Devices in Delay Tolerant Networks,” Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys) 2006, November 2006. .pdf. S-LZW Source for MSPGCC: slzw.tar.gz. Updated 10 March 2007.

Answer 6

You might also want to take a look at LZJB, being very short, simple, and lightweight.

Also, FastLZ might be worth a look. It gets better compression ratios than LZJB and has pretty minimal memory requirements for decompression:

Answer 7

If you just want to remove some repeating zero's or such, use Run-length encoding Repeating byte sequences will be stored as:

<mark><byte><count>

It's super-simple algorithm, which you can probably code yourself in few lines of code.

Answer 8

Is an external EEPROM (for example via I2C) not an option? Even if you use a compression algorithm the down side is that the size of data you may store in the internal EEPROM may not be determined in a simple way any more.. And of corse, if you really mean kBYTES, then consider a SDCard connected to the SPI... There are some light weighted open source FAT-compatible file systems in the net.