i2c News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

July 22, 2024July 22, 2024 by Debashis Das - 7 Comments

4.3-inch ESP32-S3 wireless touchscreen display features terminal block with RS485, CAN Bus, I2C, DIO

ESP32-S3 display RS485 CAN Bus terminal block

Waveshare “ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-4.3B” is a capacitive touch display development board built around an ESP32-S3 SoC with RS485, CAN Bus, I2C, and isolated DIO interfaces provided through a terminal block. The devkit features a 4.3-inch capacitive touch display that has an 800×480 resolution, RTC, and a microSD card slot. Combined with a wide input voltage range of 7-36V DC, the ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-4.3V is suitable for IoT HMI, smart home automation, and more. Previously we have written about similar development boards from Waveshare like the ESP32-S3 1.69-inch touch display, the $15 Waveshare 1.69-inch IPS touch LCD module, the Waveshare RP2040-LCD-0.99-B rounded display but they would offer no expansion pins or GPIO through pads or 4-pin connectors, while the ESP32-S3 display features a terminal block with additional interfaces like RS485 pr CAN Bus that should make wiring more convenient and versatile for the target applications. Waveshare ESP32-S3 touch LCD specifications: Wireless MCU – Espressif Systems ESP32-S3R8 […]

July 12, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Beginner friendly Arduino Plug and Make Kit features Arduino UNO R4 WiFi and Modulino I2C modules

Arduino has just launched a “Plug and Make” kit designed for beginners with an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board, several “Modulino” modules, a “Modulino” base to neatly attach the UNO R4 and modules, and various cables, spacers, screws, and nuts. When thinking about Arduino projects, breadboards or even soldering may come to mind, but the new Arduino Plug and Make Kit does not require any of those. No breadboard, jumper wires, or soldering needed. Users can simply connect the modules to the Arduino board through Qwiic cables, neatly attach everything together on the provided base, and follow one of the seven projects complete with step-by-step instructions provided with the kit. The Arduino Plug and Make Kit content Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board 7x Modulino I2C nodes Modulino Knob* – Encoder for value adjustments Modulino Pixels* – 8x LC8822-2020 RGB LEDs Modulino Distance – STMicro VL53L4 Time-of-Flight (ToF) proximity sensor to […]

February 15, 2024February 16, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Waveshare RP2040-GEEK USB development board features RP2040 MCU, 1.14-inch color display, UART/I2C/SWD ports

Waveshare RP2040-GEEK is a development board that looks like a USB flash drive but is based on a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller with a 1.14-inch 65K color LCD and some expansion ports all housed in a white plastic case. The device comes with a 4MB flash to store the firmware, a microSD card slot for data storage, a BOOT button to enter bootloader mode, two 3-pin connectors for UART and SWD debug, and a 4-pin I2C port. Waveshare RP2040-GEEK specifications: MCU – Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller clocked up to 133 MHz with 264 kB SRAM Storage – 4MB flash (W25Q32JVSSIQ) and microSD card slot Display – 1.14-inch 240×135 pixel 65K color IPS LCD display USB – 1x USB Type-A female port for power and programming Debugging – 3-pin SWD port for connecting a target board; the standard CMSIS-DAP interface can be used to debug most Arm-based microcontrollers; […]

December 6, 2023December 8, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Youyeetoo X1 x86 SBC Review – Part 2: GPIO, UART, I2C, SPI, NFC, PoE module, and power consumption

The Youyeetoo X1 x86 single board computer (SBC) with an Intel Celeron N5105 Jasper Lake CPU differs from a typical Intel or AMD mini PC by its range of IOs including SPI, I2C, UART, NFC connectivity, and support for PoE module that you won’t find in a typical computer, and that’s what we will test in the second part of the X1 SBC review along with power consumption. The Youyeetoo X1 SBC is also different from Arm-based single board computers since we can just install any x86-compatible operating system by ourselves, and w don’t need to flash a board-specific image like we would do with Arm SBCs and peripherals such as SPI, I2C or UART may be or may not usable immediately due to lack of supported drivers. We’ve already installed Ubuntu 22.04 on the Youyeetoo X1 in the first part of the review, so in the second part, we’ll […]

September 14, 2023September 13, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Pico QwiicReset board adds Reset button and Qwiic connector to Raspberry Pi Pico

Pico QwiicReset is a tiny add-on board for the Raspberry Pi Pico that adds a Reset button as well as the Qwicc connector to more easily connect I2C modules to the popular MCU board. The lack of a Reset button on the Raspberry Pi Pico has always been an issue since the reset pin is used to flash the firmware, so people have tried various ways to add a Reset button to the Pi Pico board. The Pico QwiicReset is like an extension of the Pimoroni “Captain Resetti” button with an extra Qwiic connector. The Pico QwiicReset board is shown soldered to a Raspberry Pi Pico board above, but it’s also compatible with the Raspberry Pi Pico W and it works with or without headers soldered to the board. But you may noticed the Debug header is partially covered on Pico W, which means the add-on board cannot be used […]

November 7, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

RP2040 firmware converts Raspberry Pi Pico into a an I2C to USB bridge

Nicolai Electronics’ rp2040-ic2-interface open-source firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico (or other Raspberry Pi RP2040 boards) converts the board into an I2C to USB bridge to connect any I2C sensor or module to a PC or other hardware without GPIOs. The firmware implements the USB protocol expected by the I2C-Tiny-USB kernel driver used by the original I2C-Tiny-USB project for Microchip ATMega 8-bit AVR microcontrollers. The RP2040 is however not a fork of the original project, but instead a complete re-implementation of the firmware. You’ll need to connect your I2C sensor, display, or another module to the SDA (GPIO 2) and SCL (GPIO 3) pins of the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller and flash the “pre-release” firmware to the board. You’ll find it together with the source code written in C language on GitHub. Note the project has a “proof of concept status” and more testing is needed to make sure that […]

October 27, 2022October 27, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Easily add face detection to your project with the Person Sensor module

It’s now much easier to AI features to your project thanks to better tools, but as we’ve experienced when trying out Edge Impulse machine learning platform on the XIAO BLE Sense board, it still requires some effort and the learning curve may be higher than some expect. But for common tasks like face detection, there’s no reason for the solution to be hard-to-use or expensive, and Pete Warden (Useful Sensors) has designed the $10 Person Sensor fitted with a camera module pre-programmed with algorithms that detect nearby faces and reports the results over an I2C interface. Person Sensor specifications: ASIC – Himax HX6537-A ultra-low-power AI accelerator @ 400 MHz with 2MB SRAM, 2MB flash Camera Image Sensor – 110 degrees FOV Image scan rate – 7Hz with no facial recognition Image scan rate – 5Hz with facial recognition active Host interface Qwiic connector for the I2C interface up to […]

September 1, 2022September 1, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

$5 CH347 board is a USB 2.0 bridge to I2C, SPI, UART, JTAG, and GPIO

MuseLab USB-HS-Bridge is an inexpensive ($5) board based on WCH CH347 chip with a USB 2.0 Type-C interface that acts as a bridge for I2C, SPI, UART, and JTAG interfaces, as well as GPIOs. It’s notably useful to debug and download bitstreams to FPGA development boards, but it can also be used to connect various peripherals such as I2C sensors, SPI flash devices, UART devices to basically any host with a spare USB 2.0 host port. USB-HS-Bridge specifications: Chip – WCH CH347 high-speed USB to UART, I2C, SPI and JTAG chip (See link to the datasheet for details) USB – 1x USB 2.0 Type-C port with up to 480 Mbps data rate I/Os – 2x 16-pin header with 2x UART interfaces up to 9 Mbps baudrate 1x I2C for EEPROM or sensors 1x SPI master interface with 2 chip select signals to control up to 2x SPI slave devices. The […]