Looking for confirmation of idea to store data in external eeprom

[Darrel Taylor]

With the 16F87x series PIC's, writing to Flash Memory (program space) is just as easy as writing to EEPROM. Only difference is the locations are 14-bits instead of 8.

Then you have several K of space, depending on how big your program is.

Look at the READCODE and WRITECODE statements.

If it's actually a 16F877A it's more difficult, but still doable.
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[ukemigrant]

Thanks for your replies Mel, Darrel. It has been mostly your own posts that I have been poring over to find a solution to my problem. Updating the main chip may be a possibility or I may have to just learn my lesson and get that stuff for the next project. My friend and I have already bought all the pieces for the current project, including the EEPROM chips so I figure I'll try and use them.

Mel I think I may have been confusing the MPLAB IDE with MPASM so maybe the eeprom vars file will work for me.

It's a shame though that using the onchip eeprom has all those nice data and eeprom statements and using the external one means I have to write code like that listed here to populate arrays so that I can write data to the external eeprom a page at a time.

[Darrel Taylor]

EE_Vars only works with internal EEPROM.
So if you're already at the limit of the internal EEPROM, it's not going to help.

If you write to the external EEPROM 1 byte at a time, you don't need to worry about "page write boundaries".
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[ukemigrant]

EE_Vars only works with internal EEPROM.
So if you're already at the limit of the internal EEPROM, it's not going to help.

If you write to the external EEPROM 1 byte at a time, you don't need to worry about "page write boundaries".
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Oh dear - must have missed that. Shame I was thinking how nice the code must have been to handle all the complicated I2C stuff .