7

I have an I2C peripheral that I need to interact with using a Windows 7 PC. The interaction could be through a terminal emulator, or any program that can produce a real-time log that I can process using a scripting language. Based on your experience, what is the least painful way to achieve this?

Saar Drimer
  • 868
  • 1
  • 8
  • 12

3 Answers3

9

In my experience the easiest way is the Bus Pirate, which is also a cheap alternative: http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/bus-pirate-v3-assembled-p-609.html?cPath=61_68

You can find a good tutorial for it: http://dangerousprototypes.com/bus-pirate-manual/i2c-guide/

And people in forums such as this is are familiar with it. For hobbyists, bus pirate is the way to go.

Mikko Virkkilä
  • 1,033
  • 5
  • 15
2

The are plenty of USB to I2C converters around, this would maybe be the "least painful" way to connect to your peripheral. Here is an example:

USB to I2C Converter

This one is a bus master, and seems to have half decent documentation and some sample C# code.

Oli Glaser
  • 54,990
  • 3
  • 76
  • 147
  • 3
    Oli, I'm not so fond of [GIYF](http://meta.electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/1068/whats-the-value-of-giyf) in answers, it doesn't add anything. I prefer to see that the answerer picks one example and gives details about that, like you did as well. The GIYF is then superfluous; OP *knows* about Google. HANWE! :-) – stevenvh Sep 01 '12 at 06:12
  • @Steven - I think we had this before ;-) I agree it's not of much value, but I don't think it does any harm (I only linked it as I had already googled and had the page open) In some cases folk don't know what search terms to use, so I think it can add something in rare cases. There's certainly nothing condescending about this as with LMGTFY links. I would never use it just as an answer though, just to illustrate how I came up with one (for the same reason I often include my Farnell parametric searches) – Oli Glaser Sep 01 '12 at 16:56
  • 1
    How does it show up, for example, in Windows? As serial port (COM) or as I2C? If it is Serial, it is totally useless because it is error prone and doesn't provide the speed of I2C. When Serial you can also use an tiny Arduino to translate I2C to COM over USB. So what is it, does it really make any sense? – Codebeat Aug 31 '17 at 03:24
  • Both links are broken. – Nick Bolton Jan 16 '23 at 23:56
1

I would use the ATMega chip from an Arduino Uno, or the Arduino itself. It is easy enough to interface via a terminal from a PC, then link commands from the terminal to the Arduino and have it do things with the I2C bus.

Examples abound in Arduino land...

ddb
  • 11
  • 1