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How to add parallel flash memory to Arduino

Battery profiler - my recent Arduino project - needed to store large amounts of data in some kind of flash memory controlled by Arduino. In the past, for this I used serial (SPI) chip W25Q80BV from Winbond that came in a breadboard-friendly PDIP-8 package. See this excellent tutorial on how this was done and reasons why this might be preferred from an SD card. The chip is no longer available, though, and while looking for alternatives I flirted for a time with parallel flash memory. Parallel memory? At first, this seems like a hopeless mismatch with Arduino. Parallel logic chips, after all, feature a lot of pins that need to be connected, well, in parallel. For example, the chip I used, SST39SF010A, has 32 (!) PDIP pins. Address pins alone count to 17! There is no way pin-poor Arduino, such as Pro Mini, could handle this kind of load. However, with a few additional chips I could successfully serialize the memory chip using as little as 6 Arduino pins plus I2C pins for communication.”

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