Hi Rob

> A weather station would be its primary focus

A recent Silicon Chip basic weather-monitoring project

http://www.siliconchip.com.au/cms/A_109187/article.html

uses an F88 and two 24C256 EEPROMs

The problem with any run of (probably) unique ADC readings
is that an attempt at compression will likely increase the data
size. Although this depends on the ADC resolution you choose
to use and the sampling interval. For example, if you were
stripping off the temperature decimal, you might have a run of
10x 20C for an hour. That would RLE fairly well. At other times,
eg dawn, you might find that each reading for an hour or two is
different. Compression would not work well to reduce data for
that period

As you've chosen a large PIC, you could go parallel (SD, NV,
static etc) rather than I2C or serial. The 4553 also has 32k of
16-bit memory (or 64k x 8 if you choose) and that's a good start

> I've seen on-line seem VERY computationally expensive (which
> I'm not sure if the PIC COULD do, or if it could would kill
> battery life never sleeping)

The thing to do is run the 4553 at high speed and have it woken
by a low-current clock source. That way the 4553 can get any
computations over very quickly. A slow clock, eg 32kHz, is not
always the answer to saving battery power. Tasks done at 32MHz
will be over in 1/1000th of the time at 32kHz, but 32kHz does
not use anywhere near 1/1000th of the power

You'll have to crunch the numbers based on sampling interval
and resolution

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