I2C EEPROM Programming

Thread Starter

sirch2

Joined Jan 21, 2013
1,037
I find myself needing to write about 21kB to an I2C EEPROM. This is config data for this module and I was expecting it to be a a lot smaller when I got into this project so my initial plan was to just use an Arduino to write the config over I2C to the EEPROM. However, given the size of this config data I need an alternative.

I have looked at USB to I2C adapters and they are available at reasonable prices on ebay but I am unsure about software for these. There do seem to be some bits of free software out there but seem to be tied to particular and quite expensive programmers. So I am looking for suggestions of how to get 21kB of data on to an EEPROM over I2C from a PC and I would rather not spend very much money. The Target EEPROM is a 24LC256
 

MCU88

Joined Mar 12, 2015
358
Can you not configure and code an MCU with the 24LC256 hanging off it to your computer's serial port? I did a large moving message display many years back that used the 24LC256 hanging off an PIC 16F628a MCU, plugged into the computer's serial port to download messages to the EEPROM, one character at a time. Coded an user-interface in Visual Basic to communicate with the MCU.

Do you want the link to the project, or is this not for you?
 

Thread Starter

sirch2

Joined Jan 21, 2013
1,037
Thanks MCU88, I had considered doing that but I thought it was worth asking around for alternative ideas first before getting into what will probably turn out to be a non-tivial coding job
 

Thread Starter

sirch2

Joined Jan 21, 2013
1,037
Just thought I'd update this in case anyone views it in the future. After a bit of faffing around I found that the program RealTerm - http://realterm.sourceforge.net/ - will stream a file to the serial port. So I wrote a little Arduino program to read a byte from the serial port and write it to the I2C bus amd then streamed the data to the Arduino from RealTerm. I found that the Baud rate had to be quite low, I used 300 baud, for the write operation.
 
Last edited:

Thread Starter

sirch2

Joined Jan 21, 2013
1,037
I looked into it but couldn't quite connect the dots in terms of what software I needed to drive the Pickit. The examples I found on line were a bit dated and the links to software were broken so I never got as far as actually trying it.
 
Top