Physical computing is about hooking things up. Sure, there’s also low-power and wireless in the mix, but in the end you need to tie into the real world, and that means connecting sensors, indicators, actuators, and what-have-you-not. It’s a big varied world out there!
The computing side is all about information. From a µC’s perspective, we need to direct information from sensors to us, and from us back out to indicators and actuators.
The more data you need to shuttle across (or the more frequently), the harder it becomes in terms of engineering. But sometimes all you need is to send or receive a few bytes of data, perhaps just a few times per second. That’s where I2C comes in, created over 30 years ago.
Or, more accurately: the I²C bus, which stands for the “Inter-Integrated Circuit” bus.
So the upcoming article series is about this wickedly clever “eye squared see” invention:
- Let’s take the bus– Now
- Masters and slaves– Thu
- I2C on the Raspberry Pi– Fri
- Re-flashing an LPC810 on the RPi– Sat
As before, one article per day. And while we’re at it, I’ll also use the Raspberry Pi single-board computer as an example of how to use I2C under Linux. As you’ll see, it’s really easy!
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