standalone storage device

hello i am an installation electrician but i dont know anything about electronics so here goes....
what i want to do is build a device that will passively store information so i am guessing all this but i suppose i will need sum sort of chip to recieve the data via a fixed feed then output that to a chip which will then store it to sum sort of memory device for later retrieval??? any of this sound remotely correct? lol i have tried searching the internet but cant make head nor tail of it i doubt a pic has the power so do i just need to buy a fpga and program it or can i just build something using off the shelf components???(i am cluless to what exactly a pic or fpga is capable of btw) any help would be greatly appreciated thanks adam (data will be recieved in blocks of less than 1kb)

You give no where near enough information, you need to accurately and precisely specify what you are trying to do.

i want to be able to store the asynchronous transmission between my sim card and phone so i think i need a pic connected to an sd card holder??

sparkyadam said:

i want to be able to store the asynchronous transmission between my sim card and phone so i think i need a pic connected to an sd card holder??

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Yes, you should be able to do it like that.

sorry this is probably going to be a long 1........
is a pic suitable to recieve a transmission of this type (upto 1kb) and then store it onto some form of memory lets say sd (only because i know i can retrieve the data from this) using nothing more than a suitable pic, a power supply(batterys) an sd card holder, sd card and the relevant code to program into the pic

i suppose the first thing i need to figure out is how the data is transferred i know it is 8bits + parity does it do this by changing voltage from +5 - 0 referring to 1 and 0 with a clock frequency of 3.579545 so effectively ending up with 9600 bps is this how to differentiate the 1s and 0s by the amount of time voltage is or isnt present?

assuming that the above is the case or somewhere close to the mark what would be a suitable pic to use? is it as simple as supplying voltage, a data feed and a data out for the sd card along with the relevant software as to be able to 1)receive the data in this way
2)process the data and save it to a memory card
3)perform this operation with a counter so tht each string of data is saved in its own file on the memory card

like i say i am very new to electronics so all help is appreciated even if it is just to tell me that i am way off the mark and my post doesnt make any sense(as in the bit about how the data is sent and received)
Thanks Adam

Am I correct in assuming you are looking for a data logger?

yes i think it would be safe to assume this but i wanted to build it myself for the above application. With my almost non - existant knowledge so far of building something like this i was just hoping for some pointers so i dont end up reading text after text of stuff i dont currently need to know

Like I said before, a PIC and an SD card to store the data would work fine.

If you like, a PIC and an EEPROM would work as well, but you couldn't just remove the card and read it in your PC like an SD card (assuming you write it correctly with the PIC).