New Product – Grove 6 Slot I2C Hub
Sometimes a simple product is elegant and useful. We use these Grove 6 Slot I2C Hub boards all the time to add more I2C ports to our projects.
The Grove 6 Slot I2C Hub allows you to add more I2C devices to your Grove system. This replaces the Grove 4 slot I2C hub. It has better mounting holes and an improved ground plane system to reduce noise on the I2C Bus.
Features
- – 6 Slot Grove I2C Connectors
- – Improved Ground Planes
- – Inexpensive
This board is an inexpensive way to expand the number of I2C slots in your Grove system. Contains Grove Connectors so there is no soldering required.
No Software Required
How To Use
The 6 Slot I2C Hub is easy to use. Plug one Grove cable into the I2C connector on your computer and then into one of the 6 slots on the I2C Hub (they are all identical). Now you have 5 additional Grove I2C Ports available on your system.
Sample Application
What is an I2C Bus?
An I2C bus is often used to communicate with chips or sensors that are on the same board or located physically close to the CPU. It stands for standard Inter-IC device bus. I2C was first developed by Phillips (now NXP Semiconductors). To get around licensing issues, often the bus will be called TWI (Two Wire Interface). SMBus, developed by Intel, is a subset of I2C that defines the protocols more strictly. Modern I2C systems take policies and rules from SMBus sometimes supporting both with minimal reconfiguration needed. The Raspberry Pi is one of these devices.
I2C provides good support for slow, close peripheral devices that only need be addressed occasionally. For example, a temperate measuring device will generally only change very slowly and so is a good candidate for the use of I2C, where a camera will generate lots of data quickly and potentially changes often.
I2C uses only two bi-directional open-drain lines (open-drain means the device can pull a level down to ground, but can not pull the line up to Vdd. Hence the name open-drain. Thus a requirement of I2C bus is that both lines are pulled up to Vdd. This is an important area and not properly pulling up the lines is the first and most common mistake you make when you first use an I2C bus. More on pullup resistors later in the next section. The two lines are SDA (Serial Data Line) and the SCL (Serial Clock Line). There are two types of devices you can connect to an I2C bus. They are Master devices and Slave devices. Typically, you have one Master device (The Raspberry Pi in our case) and multiple Slave devices, each with their individual 7 bit address ().