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Support Question of the Week: How do I Communicate with a SMBus Slave Device using a Master I2C/SPI Host Adapter and the Control Center Software?
Rena

I’m using the AardvarkTM I2C/SPI Host Adapter to communicate with a SMBus slave device (Accuron PS401). What I'm looking to do is establish communication with the chip and verify the communication with the BeagleTM I2C/SPI Protocol Analyzer. Do you have any examples in C, for batch mode, I2C transfers, and communicating over the SMBus?

Thanks for your question! The batch mode in the Control Center Serial Software has an example for I2C transfers, which is provided in the Control Center Software package.

There is an example C script for I2C transfers, which is provided in the Aardvark Software API package. Neither the Control Center Software nor the Aardvark Software API packages have example scripts for SMBus explicitly, but since it is based on I2C, the Aardvark adapter is completely compatible with SMBus. However, we do have information that you can modify for your specific setup. For more information about using API, please refer to section 5 of the Aardvark Adapter User Manual.

In both the batch script in Control Center and the script in the API, you can edit the hex values to correspond with commands for your part.  Once you have the appropriate values, you can execute the commands to see if you get an appropriate response.  You can then connect your Beagle analyzer to the same lines to monitor the data sent the Aardvark and your chip.

Using the Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter, Control Center Software and Modified API to Communicate over the SMBus. Figure 1: Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter

The steps above should provide a good baseline for establishing communication between the Aardvark adapter and your SMSC.

For additional information, please refer to the following documents:

We hope this answers your question. If you have other questions about our Host Adapters or other Total Phase products, feel free to email us at sales@totalphase.com or submit a request for technical support.