If you have a project with any audio, video, graphics, data logging, etc in it, you'll find that having a removable storage option is essential. Most microcontrollers have extremely limited built-in storage. For example, even the Arduino Mega chip (the Atmega2560) has a mere 4Kbytes of EEPROM storage. There's more flash (256K) but you can't write to it as easily and you have to be careful if you want to store information in flash that you don't overwrite the program itself!
If you're doing any sort of data logging, graphics or audio, you'll need at least a megabyte of storage, and 64 M is probably the minimum. To get that kind of storage we're going to use the same type that's in every digital camera and mp3 player: flash cards! Often called SD or microSD cards, they can pack gigabytes into a space smaller than a coin. They're also available in every electronics shop so you can easily get more and best of all, many computers have SD or microSD card readers built in so you can move data back and forth between say your Arduino GPS data logger and your computer graphing software:

This guide was first published on Jul 31, 2013. It was last updated on Mar 13, 2024.

This page (Introduction) was last updated on Jul 24, 2013.

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