Many ICs and microprocessors use an industry standard two-wire serial bus protocol (for example, I2C, IIC, SMBus, TWI, etc.). These protocols are very powerful since they allow you to connect a variety of devices using only two wires. But what if you want to access this range of A/D, DAC, temperature sensors, and other devices from a PC? With the GP-7 it is simple to connect two wire devices to any PC with a serial port.

How does it work? You simply connect the GP-7 to the two wire bus and it acts as a master, controlling the bus. You send simple ASCII commands to the GP-7, or use the handy ActiveX control to command the bus from any programming language that can use ActiveX.

In addition to the two wire serial capabilities of this kit, you can also take advantage of its 8 digital I/O ports, and 4 10-bit analog inputs! This makes it perfect for creating a PC-based tester for two wire serial equipment. What can you do with a GP-7? Here's some ideas:

Test two wire circuits using custom software

Create a serial EEPROM programmer

Read an LM76 temperature sensor

Control I2C digital to analog or analog to digital controllers

Control I2C digital potentiometers

The GP-7 has a simple command set and also includes an ActiveX control to simplify programming. Here's an example Visual Basic program reading the temperature from an LM76 sensor:

Here's the corresponding code that reads the temperature (in centigrade):

I2CA.Data = Array() ' no data to send
I2CA.Receive 2  ' read two bytes
t = I2CA.Data(0) * 256 + I2CA.Data(1)  ' assemble into 1 word
I2CA.BusStop  ' be sure to let chip read data again
t = t / 8 * 0.0625 ' convert to C

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