T’other week, I wrote about my work on building a Raspberry Pi RP2040-based I²C host device and some macOS client software to control it. I mentioned that I might get the latter running under Linux too. I now have, and it does.
This post was originally going to be about building a tool to access I²C devices on a Mac, reaching them via USB and an Excamera Labs I2CMini adaptor board. But then I accidentally snapped the pins and board traces off my I2CMini, so I had to go back to the drawing board. Now it’s about accessing I²C devices on a Mac using a Raspberry Pi Pico, or any other RP2040-based board, as the adaptor.
When it comes to hacking hardware there’s an easy way and there’s a hard way.
The hard way involves connecting peripherals direct to one of the standard buses supported by your Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Beaglebone or whatever. Buses like I²C, SPI, UART and 1-Wire. You’ll need to take care with your wiring: have you got the right pull-up or pull-down resistor? Is there too much capacitance in the line?
Better late than never. An edited version of this review appeared in The Register in August 2014. I intended to reproduce the original here, but never got round to it. At long last – and a tad late now the Pi 2 is out, of course – here for the record…
You might think that were you a purveyor of a nifty compact computer selling by the millions, you’d consider two years after the debut of your first offering that it was high time you tempted back buyers with a go-faster, more capacious and shinier model. Heck, Apple and others don’t even wait that long: they upgrade products year in, year out.
smittytone messes with micros 