Hi Max: * Maximilian Ott <max at semandex.net> [2004-12-27 22:08:19 -0500]: > I'm prototyping an appliance type box based on the EPIA-TC board > (http://www.viaembedded.com/product/epia_tc_spec.jsp?motherboardId=201). > This board supposedly has a I2C bus accessible on a connector. > > I also built a small board with a few LEDs driven by a TI TPIC2810 > (8-BIT LED DRIVER WITH I2C INTERFACE) which I would like to hook up to the > motherboard and control from a user-space process. The whole thing will run > a 2.6 linux kernel. > > Could somebody please give me a few pointers to get started. It sounds like you already know about I2C and probably SMBus as well. On Linux, you'll need a bus driver for your board. Some VIA chipsets are already supported... you could grab the freshly released 2.9.0 of the lm_sensors2 package and build the userspace parts (kernel 2.6 already has the most up-to-date kernel parts). Then try 'sensors-detect'. Assuming you have a working bus driver, the easiest way to access it for prototyping would be the i2c /dev interface. This requires the module i2c-dev (if you ran 'sensors-detect' OK, you already have it). Take a look at i2c-dev.h in the kernel headers if you want to program in in C. For prototyping, it would be much easier to re-use the Perl bindings which can be found in sensors-detect. Or if you prefer Python, lucky you: I just now published a module for that. The announcement hasn't appeared in the mail archive yet, but you will eventually see it near the bottom of this page (which is good to browse anyway): http://archives.andrew.net.au/lm-sensors/ Regards, -- Mark M. Hoffman mhoffman at lightlink.com
