What are a few good ways to connect multiple I2C busses?

Question

I have an issue with a project. I have a backplane with an Atmega328P based microcontroller controlling an I2C bus with multiple peripheral devices. One such peripheral is a removable card with another Atmega328P based microcontroller as the peripheral. I have a TCA4311ADR I2C hotswap buffer on the backplane connected to the port that connects to the card. The card is supposed to be a peripheral device that sends processed data from a sensor to the backplane.

Here’s my issue: one of the sensors I intend to use on the card is an I2C breakout board. To control it, the microcontroller on the card needs to act as a controller, but it also needs to be a peripheral to communicate with the backplane controller. Every time I try to make this work and the card tries to communicate with the sensor, it tries to start a new I2C bus and everything starts glitching.

I’ve tried a few options. Software used to turn normal digital pins into I2C pins didn’t work since the libraries don’t seem compatible. I can’t seem to get the card peripheral to wait until the controller starts the bus before trying to control the sensor to avoid a conflict.

I had an idea to use an I2C multiplexer like the TCA9543A to create two busses but I don’t know if that would work. I also don’t wanna just use SPI or Serial to connect the microcontrollers cause I’d have to undo months of work on coding and custom PCBs. Also using Serial would complicate the connection to the computer and using SPI wouldn’t work if I use an SPI sensor breakout later.

Is there any other way to make this system work?

Answer 1

In an ideal world you would have your other sensor on a separate I2C bus. It can be done with software, but chances are you will have to re-write the library that supports it to use bit-banged I2C.

Yes, you could use an I2C MUX to share the single hardware I2C channel, however that will both be awkward and the results will be sub-optimal anyway.

Most I2C MUX chips, including the TCA9543A, are controlled themselves by I2C, so you can't really use them in your environment, since you really need to switch it to isolate your main bus from the MCU before you switch it from slave to master, which you can't do until after you have switched it from slave to master. If you switch to master before isolating the bus you risk a collision with the main master on the bus and everything going horribly wrong.

These MUX chips are really designed for allowing one master to talk to multiple slaves that share the same addresses.

And on top of that when you've isolated the bus the main master will no longer be able to communicate with that slave board, which will either cause the whole bus to lock up or other strange and unwanted things to happen.

So have another go at using software I2C to communicate with your sensor. Most I2C communication to sensors is pretty straightforward and follows the same rough format, so it really shouldn't be too hard to implement.

Either that or consider replacing the ATMega328P with a more capable microcontroller that has multiple I2C busses.