Garbage stored in SD card

Question

I am an electronics graduate and an embedded design engineer, working in this field for about two years apart from the hobby time during my graduation. I am currently working on a system that has an Atmega2560 as the core controller with an arduino bootloader, we are using an 8GB memory card to save the log data from our system and send it to our server at regular intervals of time. The system worked fine however some of them are facing issues with the writing of data, some garbage value are getting stored in the SD card. I have attached the schematic and code snippet for the same, please let me know if there is any problem with the system and how can i resolve it, please let me know if any other things are required for understanding the problem correctly.

Thank you in advance.

     SD_Initialize();
  if(!SD.exists(SDTransactionDirectory)) 
  {
    if(SD.mkdir(SDTransactionDirectory)) 
    {

    }
  }
  RTC_Date_Time();
  String FileName = SDTransactionDirectory + "/" + RTCSDDate + RTCSDTime + ".txt";
  SD_File = SD.open(FileName, FILE_WRITE);
  if(SD_File)
  {
    delay(100);
    digitalWrite(LED_SD, HIGH);
    SD_File.println(GSMData);
    SD_File.close();
  }

The SD_Initialize() is a user function:-

void SD_Initialize()          //initialise SD card
{
  digitalWrite(SD_EN, HIGH);
  digitalWrite(SD_CS, LOW);

  delay(500);

  if(SD.begin(SD_CS))
  {
    digitalWrite(LED_SD, HIGH);
  }
  else
  {
    digitalWrite(LED_SD, LOW);
  }
}

The data stored in the filename is as follows:- CLEnT|T|M008|\00Ÿûmï°]ŸëÜ£·zoòTÏæ{Œü[ŸýUô~ÛcCWY®ÞgÙë×<;wBÄgnìÇFÿÉ=XoÎ.êžÄf·®ö¯³ç~åeÝ]1_ÏÀyÿÌÍ?ô"zBõ¬ñ

As you can see the initial values till "M008" is fine but its garbage after that, and the CLEnt|T|M008 is the start of the string after that a lot of other parameter information is to be stored which turns out to be garbage.

Answer 1

There are many comments, but no answer yet. This answer has only a few basic rules.

The first thing to do is to see if the problem can be replicated with a small sketch and to check the voltages.

The arduino mega 2560 works best at 5.0V, or maybe a little less. It is not reliable at 4V. When powering it with a 5V power supply, the usb connecter is the best option to power the arduino board. Powering the arduino board via the 5v pin is not advised. When a strong power supply is connected to the 5v pin, the voltage regulator can be blown.

When something is not working, fall back to something that is reliable. For example a SD module with a HC4050 to shift the voltage levels. The resistors make the signal weaker.

Make a small test sketch without the use of the String object. The more experienced someone is with arduino, the more he or she tells to avoid the String object with avr microcontrollers.

There are counterfeit SD cards. One of those might turn up in your hands someday. Beside that, not every SD card is compatible with the arduino SD library.

In your situation it is suspicious that the file system is okay, the filenames are okay, the first text is okay, but when data is written it suddenly goes wrong. That is a strong indication for a memory problem.

When data to a display or SD card is wrong, then send it also to the serial monitor. You have to know what is actually written to the SD card.