I2C the Easy Way

If you’re going to experiment with I2C – may as well do it the easy way. Having spent the past few days with a desk that looks remarkably like a bowl of spaghetti, I’ve finally gotten around to making a special IOTBEAR board up for the job. 18 each of ground, +3v3 and +5v lines – and 16 each of GPIO4 and GPIO5.

This gave me the opportunity to tackle that long string problem in Arduino Wire. A brief attempt with the logic analyser suggested that my ESP i2c was sending out at least one byte more than the Arduino was receiving – impossible to tell if more because the ESP would stop sending as soon as the Arduino would stop receiving.

And that brings me to a question – is anyone aware of a nice, pretty I2c and other protocol analyser based on a Raspberry Pi? Seems to me that would be a good use for an old RPI2?

Anyway I digress… I’ve had issues with I2c experiments in the past – usually when sending strings. I’ve looked up the issue on Google and found nothing. I was convinced it was a timing issue and at that point I Skyped my friend Peter Oakes in Canada – just as with Aidan who you’ll have read about in here, I often find that “two heads are better than one” when I’m getting bogged down.

We started sending I2c strings to the Arduino who’s receive buffer I’d put a Serial.println() statement in – to see how many characters it THOUGHT it was receiving.

29…. 30… 31… 32… 32   – EH

As I increased the length of string sent from the ESP (using ESP software I2c) to the Arduino (using the WIRE library) at 33 characters the Arduino thought it was getting 32 – at 34 it went to meet it’s maker.

VOILA – the WIRE library clearly has a buffer to store stuff – I did not believe at first that 1. the buffer would be so small and 2. this would result in a crude crash.  I went into the Wire Library (that’s a long story – I have dozens of WIRE libraries and it took a while to find the right one) – updated the buffer size in wire.h and… nothing – made no difference. I introduced an error into the .h file to make sure I had the right one – sure enough  – but no joy on fixing the problem.

I don’t know if Peter or I twigged first but in my ESP SERIAL buffering which I wrote myself, I have a 256 buffer for incoming characters – which fills until it gets a CRLF then transfers that to an output buffer of the same size – so that incoming characters can continue to arrive while processing the buffer. It occurred to us that maybe the Wire library has the same setup – SURE ENOUGH. Not only is there a buffer definition in arduino/hardware/arduino/avr/libraries/wire/src/wire.h but also in arduino/hardware/arduino/avr/libraries/wire/src/utility/twi.h

And yes, the directory structure IS that complicated (I’m on Arduino 1.69) – sure enough two separate 32 byte buffers are created.  As I have never seen this covered so I assume I’m the only person in the world who’s ever sent 32 bytes via I2c… but if you’re about to try the same – and you’ll need to if you want to try my peripheral software, then I suggest despite the deep hole this will leave in RAM (all 2K of it) – making both of these 128 bytes.

Since amending and re-compiling – I can now send long strings to the Arduino absolutely to my heart’s content!

{nano:9,7,”how are you today and the weather is nice – NO REALLY it certainly is.”,0}

Around 15ms in total – not stunningly fast but fast enough not to interfere with the running of anything.

For more on I2C – see the blog entry “Faster ESP I2C”