First step: Simply use the Arduino IDE and the Wire lib. I use an Seeeduino because I need an Arduino that works at 3.3v level. Here the code :

#include <Wire.h>
void setup()
{
  Wire.begin(4);                // join i2c bus with address #4
  Wire.onReceive(receiveEvent); // register event
  Wire.onRequest(requestEvent); // register event
  Serial.begin(38400);           // start serial for output
  Serial.println("Boot Ok");
}

void loop()
{ delay(100); }

void receiveEvent(int howMany)
{
  char c = NULL;
  while(Wire.available()) // loop through all
  {
    c = Wire.receive(); // receive byte as a character
    Serial.print(c);         // print the character
  }
  Serial.println();
  Serial.println("===");
}

void requestEvent()
{
  Serial.println("read");
  Wire.send("Hello world from Arduino");
}

To test the Arduino I used a Bus Pirate, this is quite simple and fun, here a little snipset of my initial test with the BP (note the string are different). The I2C slave is at the 0×4 address (check the setup()).

Searching I2C address space. Found devices at:
0x08(0x04 W) 0x09(0x04 R) 

Read content from the device, 'ABCD'
I2C>[0x09 rrrrrr]
I2C START BIT
WRITE: 0x09 ACK
READ: 0x41
READ:  ACK 0x42
READ:  ACK 0x43
READ:  ACK 0x44
READ:  ACK 0xFF
READ:  ACK 0xFF
NACK
I2C STOP BIT
I2C>

send content to the device 'ABC'
I2C>[0x08 0x41 0x42 0x43]
I2C START BIT
WRITE: 0x08 ACK
WRITE: 0x41 ACK
WRITE: 0x42 ACK
WRITE: 0x43 ACK
I2C STOP BIT

Second step: Plug the Arduino to the NGW100. I used the wrapping technique. Simply connect SDA, SCL, and GND. (NGW100 pinouts : SDA=>9, SCL=>10, GND=>2)

On Linux, load the I2C-GPIO kernel module. On OpenWRT (used on the NGW100), simply load the kmod-i2c-gpio package.

Final step: If everything is Ok, we can now test the communication. I used a small piece of C code to deal with I2C on Linux.

#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <linux/i2c-dev.h>
#include <sys/ioctl.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

void i2c_run(void) {
    int file;
    char filename[40];
    int addr = 0x4;
    char buf[32] = {0};
    int i;

    sprintf(filename,"/dev/i2c-0");
    if ((file = open(filename,O_RDWR)) < 0) {
        printf("Failed to open the bus.");
        exit(1);
    }

    if (ioctl(file,I2C_SLAVE,addr) < 0) {
        printf("Failed to acquire bus access and/or talk to slave.\n");
        exit(1);
    }

    i = 24;
    // read I2C
    if (read(file,buf,i) != i) {
      printf("Failed to read from the i2c bus.\n");
    } else {
      printf("Read %d bytes from I2C: [%s]\n",i,buf);
    }

    sprintf(buf,"IC2 from Linux to Arduino");
    i = strlen(buf);
    if (write(file,buf,i) != i) {
        printf("Failed to write to the i2c bus.\n");
    } else {
      printf("Sent %d bytes to I2C: [%s]\n",i,buf);
    }
}

int main()
{
  i2c_run();
  return 0;
}

As you can see this code is a bit rude, but works really well : Read the I2C bus, and send a sample string, a proof ? :)

Of course, I used string values but in real life a small protocol shoud be used. Another important thing: I used a NGW100 but you can use the same idea on all Linux embedded board like the Fonera, or anything else.

Update: Of course you can use the i2c-tools on Linux to detect your own device. To do that : Grab the i2c-tools source, and cross compile it for the AVR32. (You only have to change the CC path in the Makefile).

/Enjoy small Linux

The main issue here, is that I used my main computer to monitor an 1wire network of external, heating and rooms temperature. I used a small Arduino card and a couple of Python scripts to populate some munin graph, like this one:

As you can see on this graph, I use a reference temperature from Guipavas. This stuff is public, and I use the Weather.com for the info. All works fine for about an year now. But when I switched to my new little box (300Mhz..) the python script used to monitor the 1wire network and gather weather.com reference was a bit heavier than excepted for this little box.

I first thought to rewrite this in pure C, but having to deal w/ xml parsing (libxml) and Posix serial in C .. That’s the little story, I decided to rewrite this script (and other) in Vala. I will not dump the Vala introduction here, but to be short it’s a new language that produce C used by Gnome Desktop. The syntax tend to be a C# like, and it has a lot of libraries and doesn’t need the bloat of an interpreter (nor VM). My first test was to listen to the Arduino serial port.

public void run()
{
ser = new Serial.POSIX();
loop = new GLib.MainLoop();
ser.speed=Serial.Speed.B38400;
ser.received_data.connect(parseSerial);
loop.run();
}

I used a Serial.vala wrapper found on the net, this is simple and neat. Just added some string parsing, and I get my Arduino 1wire network working w/ Vala .. The next is the Weather.com parsing which will be covered in a future post.
To conclude, the Vala result is fine. The result binary is small 38KB, it has quite a lot of dependencies (libsoup,glib, pthread, gobject..) and consume more memory than my python script. Python interpreter + Elementtree (xml parsing) + pyserial eat around 8.9MB of RAM, while the my Vala code eat 12.3MB. But keep in mind that’s this is with all the shared libraries. So, if you use a couple of script like me, this memory isn’t a big deal, because it will be used across different process without any overhead.

In meantimes, the main difference between the two version is the speed, here come some results with the time command of the weather.com functions only (I dropped the serial IO stuff for this test) :

jkx@brick:~$ time python weather.py
Temp:    20
Pres:    1021.0 hPa
Wind:    19 km/s

real    0m2.105s
user    0m1.468s
sys     0m0.216s

jkx@brick:~$ time ./weather
Temp:    20 deg
Pres:    1021.0 hPa
Wind:    19 km/s

real    0m0.427s
user    0m0.084s
sys     0m0.032s

Ok, Python takes 4x the Vala time for the same stuff. Of course this piece of code isn’t exactly the same, and evolve an network access, but I tested this a couple of times, and the result is always ~ the same, so I decide to look closer, and found that despite Python interpreter load quite speedy, ElementTree + urllib2 take 1.35sec to import

I get it, this system has a really small CPU and importing libs from harddrive takes times .. which doesn’t occur with my Vala code, the binary is small, and all dependency are already loaded by the OS itself. To conclude, Python is still my favorite language but running python script on small system has an overhead which I must take care, and avoiding loading / unloading libs is the key. A single python process, with some script loaded will be a better choice. And for small custom apps used on this kind of system, Vala seems to be a good alternative.

// Enjoy the sun