For one of the projects in the Jee Labs, I needed a bit more “permanent” memory than the ATmega’s EEPROM or even flash could provide. Here’s what I came up with:

That’s a 64 Kbyte AT24C512B serial EEPROM memory which talks via I2C.

It takes only 4 wires to hook this thing up:

And this is the mess you get in when you don’t have the right connectors and need to deal with older boards:

That’s the “regret plug” mentioned a few days back, to turn the downward pointing male header into an upward pointing female header, plus a “cross-over plug” to let me wire this thing up for the new JeeNode v3 pinout, yet use it on a (minimally populated) v2 board. Yuck!

Lesson: think about headers before deciding how to solder them on …

All future JeeNodes will be supplied with 6-pin female headers for the ports. Soldering them on pointing up is probably most convenient: it lets you stick little LEDs and wires in there, and JeePlugs can be placed pointing upright – such as this memory.

Back to the memory expansion. Here’s a test sketch:

Sample output:

As you can see, the count did not start with 255, as it would have if the EEPROM had still been empty. The JeeNode was powered off in between to demonstrate data retention.

This example code runs at full bit-banging speed – seems to work just fine.

The “eemem” demo sketch has been added to the Ports library and is available in this ZIP file as well as here.

There you go … a whopping half million extra bits of permanent storage :)