How to Setup I2C Communication

[ladiazusc]

Hey there, I'm working on a 2-person class project at USC. We are a pair of Astronautical Engineering students, having so far implemented the LED blinker tutorial onto a Raspberry Pi - LED setup.

Moving forward, we would love to explore data retrieval to start using the charts feature. Specifically, we have a DHT20 Sensor and would like to ask for guidance on how to configure this. It's an I2C component that we learned to use on microcontrollers. I find it difficult to conceptualize how this would work, since we usually use imported libraries for these, need a setup and its own status/reading sequence from our course site.

Does this need a driver? Or something like that?

[timcanham]

@ladiazusc

Do you have existing C libraries that work on the Raspberry Pi? Was your embedded software writing to the I2c controllers directly, or using libraries for that microcontroller?

[timcanham]

If you know how to build the I2C packets for the sensor you can write a manager component that uses the F Prime Linux I2c driver. The manager would present the sensor to users in the physical units like temperature and humidity, and build the I2C packets to query the sensor. If you have a RPI library that already uses I2C in the background, you can wrap the whole library in a manager component and call its API to get sensor measurements.