Reading another thread here, in which someone who may or may not be a troll (jury still seems to be out there) asked about using an EPROM they have without a microprocessor. Of course, their proposal was hopelessly naive, not well thought-through, etc., etc.
So I'm asking, seriously and out of curiosity, whether it is possible to do this, to use EPROM (or some other flavor of non-volatile memory) in a circuit without the usual support of a µc/µp.
Now, I know that this is possible, given enough supporting circuitry; what I'm really asking is whether it's at all practical.
Even if it is not, which I suspect is probably the case, I am curious to know just what kind of support circuitry would be required to read and write such memory without a proper micro. I do have a bunch of electronics textbooks, but none of them deal specifically with memory.
I mean, it would be nice to be able to squirrel away a few bits and bytes of information in NVRAM without having to go through all the programming and such ...
So I'm asking, seriously and out of curiosity, whether it is possible to do this, to use EPROM (or some other flavor of non-volatile memory) in a circuit without the usual support of a µc/µp.
Now, I know that this is possible, given enough supporting circuitry; what I'm really asking is whether it's at all practical.
Even if it is not, which I suspect is probably the case, I am curious to know just what kind of support circuitry would be required to read and write such memory without a proper micro. I do have a bunch of electronics textbooks, but none of them deal specifically with memory.
I mean, it would be nice to be able to squirrel away a few bits and bytes of information in NVRAM without having to go through all the programming and such ...