joe_e said:
-- How many times can I flash it before it no longer functions?
Most eeproms can be reprogrammed up to a million times...
joe_e said:
-- Would it be better to have an easily removable chip and a seperate flashing device connected to the PC, or a flashing device "built-in" to the "book"?
I would build in the USB interface, like you intended to, using the fdti chip already mentioned it is as easy as RS232 communications, you could just plug your 'book' into a usb port and upload new text.
PC software can be written in visual basic or any language you like with serial port (COM port) support.
That's what the FT2332BM chip does, it fools your pc software into thinking the USB port is a com port, wich makes it easy to program...
joe_e said:
-- And exactly how should I do this setup? Would it be EEPROM--->PIC--->LCD ?
PC -> FT2332BM -> PIC (for pc communications)
EEPROM -> PIC
LCD -> PIC
BUTTONS -> PIC
As you can see, the pic handles it all ...
As for the eeprom, There are serial (I²C) eeproms too wich go up to a megabyte (and more), as displaying text on a lcd doesn't require much speed you could use such a serial eeprom, wich are cheaper.
They are slower then parallel, but you don't need the speed to read your book anyway, on the other side, a parallel eeprom will be faster when downloading new text to the device from the pc. It's a tradeoff you'll have to make for yourself...
And what to expect from a megabyte, well, i don't have any books handy, but to give a little example, I've got the Quake2 C sourcecode here (pure ascii text). I took some files togheter wich gave me 256Kb and that was about 12000 lines of code..
Of course, there's nothing stopping you from using 2 chips and doubling the capacity