Breaking a 16-bit long int to write into eeprom?

Question

I am writing data to eeprom AT24C16 using PIC microcontroller pic18f4520. Every address of this eeprom can hold 8-bits while I am using long int's to store data that are 16-bit in size. How to break long int into 2 8-bit parts to write them and how to get them back together after reading from eeprom??

Answer 1

In C, you can use bit-shift and masking to extract each byte of a longer number:

lower_8bits = value & 0xff;
upper_8bits = (value >> 8) & 0xff;

And you can 'reassemble' the number from bytes by doing the reverse:

value = (upper_8bits << 8) | lower_8bits;

Answer 2

long int my16bitdata = 0xEA51;

int MSB, LSB;

MSB = (my16bitdata>>8) & 0xFF;
LSB = my16bitdata & 0xFF;

In this case the outcome would be:

MSB = 0xEA

and

LSB = 0x51 

Explaination:

By perfoming a bit shift(>>) operation on the 16 bit value, we can slide the upper bits down to the lower section. All 8 of them. We then do a bitwise AND (&) with a 0xFF to apply that value to the 8 bits available in the 'int'.

For the lower 8 bits (LSB), no bit shift is required so we can just do the bitwise AND to get the data we need.

Answer 3

A higher level approach that lets the compiler do the shifting would look like this:

typedef union Int16
{
  int data;
  struct
  {
    unsigned char lsb;
    unsigned char msb;
  }bytes __attribute__ ((packed));
}Int16 __attribute__ ((packed));
#define MSB bytes.msb    
#define LSB bytes.lsb    

Int16 myInt;
unsigned char msb, lsb;

myInt.data = 0x1234;
msb = myInt.MSB;
lsb = myInt.LSB;