Slave A1B3: Basic I2C Slave Write and Read with TWI hardware support

A1. Hardware support (TWI)
B3. Single Write and Read function

This project provides a minimal I2C Slave that can be used with an Arduino or other board that can act as an I2C Master.
The four wire interface provides VCC, GND, SCL, and SDA signals. Since VCC is supplied by the Master board, this design is compatible with 5v and 3.3v systems provided that the AVR chip supports the voltage level. (2.7v-5.0v) or (1.8v-5.0v).
The software is designed to run with a Slave using an 8 MHz CPU clock (uncheck the CKDIV8 fuse when programming). No adjustment is needed to support the Master provided 100 kHz or 400 kHz SCL clock speeds. However, if a different CPU clock is used, it must be at least 16 times the SCL clock.
The software is compatible with Atmel Studio 6.2 and is written in 'C'.

Hardware

Components for a basic A1+B3 Slave device to receive a command and send back data using an ATmega44/88/168/328, ATmega164/324/644/1284, or any AVR with a TWI hardware section.

Schematic A1B3 Bread Board A1B3
Schematic A1B3 Bread Board A1B3

Parts List

1 Protoboard
1 AVR microcontroller (example Atmega88A)
1 10uF electrolytic capacitor (optional for power filtering)
2 6.8k ohm 1/4 watt resistor
4 Jumper wires for VCC, GND, SCL, and SDA lines.
1 Arduino UNO

Software Files

After setting up a bare C project in Atmel Studio, copy these files into the source code area and add them to the project.

Copy the code from Slave_A1B3.c into your main.c for the project and build.
Program the AVR chip and connect up the jumper wires to the Arduino board.
The complete Atmel Studio project can also be downloaded from GitHub. Slave A1B3

Load the Arduino_A1B3_demo code into the Arduino IDE and select the board and COM port that you will use. Build and download into the Arduino board.
Go to Tools > Serial Terminal to monitor the data being read back.
If the AVR is connected to the Arduino, the terminal window should display an incrementing data count as shown below.

Terminal A1B3
Terminal A1B3

Process Flow: Like most C programs, the process begins with a call to main() to start the program. The first thing that main() does is initialize the data count to 0. It then calls twiSlaveInit( adrs ) to initialize the TWI hardware and pass it the I2C address of the Slave.
The address is a unique 7-bit value and a different value has to be assigned to each Slave on the I2C bus to prevent conflicts.
Once the hardware is setup, the interrupts are enabled by calling sei() to set the Global Interrupt flag.
Finally, the Slave is activated by calling twiSlaveEnable(). After this point, the Slave will automatically respond to its address. SDA_W data (commands) will go into the RxBuf[] FIFO. When sent a SDA_R mode address, it will copy the data from the TxBuf[] FIFO into the transmit register to be sent out.

The process now enters an infinite WHILE loop. This simple loop continually checks for data in the Receive FIFO Buffer by calling twiDataInReceiveBuffer() and checking for a TRUE return value just like in Slave _A1B1.
When the IF statement evaluates true (command received), the command is tested and if it is 0x55, the command and data count are copied into the TxBuf[] FIFO so that they will be sent out when a SDA_R is used to read the data.
If the command was not 0x55, the command is still sent to the TxBuf[], but a 0 is loaded in behind it instead of the count.
The last step is to adjust the count to show that the Slave is modifying the data.

If the Serial Monitor does not show data, check wiring and that the Slave address being sent by the Master is the same as the one the Slave is set to.
If the characters on the Serial Monitor look strange, check that the baud rate setting (lower right corner) is set to 57600 to match the Arduino Serial.begin(57600) setting.
Unfourtunatly, an oscilloscope is needed to troubleshoot farther than code inspection and wiring checks.

With a single command to read back two bytes of data, the process is still simple, but it is starting to get more complicated. If your step back and look over the projects done so far, you should notice that they are fairly modular with checks and calls to support commands and data processing.
The next examples will get rid of the IF statements and use a table structure to develope a framework where Operation modules, with their own commands and data generators, can be added with ease.

Now that this project is working, it provdes another baseline of operations.

  1. The Arduino Master can ask for specific data from the AVR Slave.
  2. The multiple bytes of data can be sent back by the Slave.
  3. The hardware is wired correctly for I2C communications.