Set EEPROM from PC before program I have been working on an arduino program, which has gotten rather large. I am close to hitting the 32k limit on Flash for my ATmega328p. I would like lower my program size by saving some of my many string literals into EEPROM.

All of the example programs on the EEPROM page suggest loading them in at runtime, in which case they would take up flash memory anyways! What I am wondering, is if there is a way to write to EEPROM from my PC, THEN load the arduino program which will access those values. Do I need some external hardware to do this?

Thanks for your help!

-sam
The simplest way would be to have two sketches. 

One that will store all the strings into EEPROM. 

After that you can upload the second actual sketch that uses the values stored in EEPROM. 

You only need to upload the first sketch if any of the strings change.

There is a way to upload a hex directly to the EEPROM using avrdude, but you'd have to use the commandline, and also have some way of generating this hex file containing all these strings.