9. The Memory LOW down.

One thing to watch out for when connecting the Arduino to things like memory chips is that by default all the Arduino pins are LOW. Now considering that connections on the memory chips like WE (write enable) and CE (chip enable) are "active Low", then they will be active when a new program is loaded into the Arduino. This means you could overwrite your memory inadvertently. Most likely you will write the value 0 to the address 0 since all the data and address lines will probably be low.

Of course I am talking from experience here as this is exactly what happended to me when I was playing with the SRAM chip. I wrote 2 programs, one called SRAM_Writer and one called SRAM_Reader. I initially ran the Writer and then the Reader. Everything read back OK except memory address 0 which was 0 and my Writer program had written a value of 3 to it.

For safety, best to use some inverters like the 7404s on the critial connections so that they will be HIGH when the Arduino starts up.