I²C Driver Core

I²CDriver is an easy-to-use, open source tool for controlling I²C devices. It works with Windows, Mac, and Linux, and has a built-in color screen that shows a live "dashboard" of all the I²C activity. It uses a standard FTDI USB serial chip to talk to the PC, so no special drivers need to be installed. The board includes a separate 3.3 V supply with voltage and current monitoring.

Features

• Open hardware: the design, firmware and all tools are under BSD license
• Live display: shows you exactly what it's doing all the time
• Fast transfer: sustained I²C transfers at 400 and 100 kHz
• USB power monitoring: USB line voltage monitor to detect supply problems, to 0.01 V
• Target power monitoring: target device high-side current measurement, to 5 mA
• I²C pullups: programmable I²C pullup resistors, with automatic tuning
• Three I²C ports: three identical I²C ports, each with power and I²C signals
• Jumpers: color coded jumpers included in each pledge level
• 3.3 output: output levels are 3.3 V, all are 5 V tolerant
• Supports all I²C features: 7- and 10-bit I²C addressing, clock stretching, bus arbitration
• Sturdy componentry: uses an FTDI USB serial adapter, and Silicon Labs automotive-grade EFM8 controller
• Usage reporting: reports uptime, temperature, and running CRC of all traffic
• Flexible control: GUI, command-line, C/C++, and Python 2/3 host software provided for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Specifications

• Maximum power out current: up to 470 mA
• Device current: up to 25 mA
• Dimensions: 61 mm x 49 mm x 6 mm
• Computer interface: USB 2.0, micro USB connector

I²C is Everywhere

It’s in every phone, in your embedded electronics, in every microcontroller, Raspberry Pi, and PC motherboard. It’s a mature technology - still going strong after 36 years. Because it’s everywhere, I²C is used by everyone from novices to embedded designers. But the common element of everyone’s I²C experience is struggle. Instead of being easy, I²C very often feels really difficult. Because there are so many ways for I²C to go wrong, things rarely "just work" and instead involve some painful debugging.

Do More With I²CDriver

By controlling I²C hardware using the PC tools you’re most comfortable with, you can get devices doing what you want in a fraction of the development time. Calibrating devices like accelerometers, magnetometers, and gyroscopes is much simpler and faster when done directly on the PC through I²CDriver.

I²CDriver ships with Python examples using small groups of I²C devices to make something useful.

Watch the Whole Network

As well a a live decode of the traffic, the built in display shows a heatmap of all active network nodes. So in an I²C network with multiple devices, you can see at a glance which ones are the most active.

See what I²C is Doing Instantly

When an I²CDriver is connected to an existing I²C bus, it "snoops" the traffic and displays it on the screen. This provides an excellent tool for debugging I²C issues, because you can listen in on the conversation as it happens.

Capture I²C Traffic to Your PC

I²CDriver can dump all I²C traffic back to the PC. I²CDriver’s capture mode reliably records every bit to an exhaustive time-stamped log. This is really helpful for debug, analysis, and reverse-engineering. Supported formats include text, CSV, and VCD.

Resources

• User Guide
• Windows Drivers
• For Mac, and Linux install the driver from python with: pip install i2cdriver and run the GUI as i2cgui.py.
• Design Files and Firmware