Can i connect multiple devices with Olinuxino Micro on I2C line?

[Rubid]

Hi,
can anybody give me an example how to connect several devices with Olinuxino Micro using I2C?
I wanted to use two ENC28J60 ethernet modules with Olinuxino Micro. Will it work? If yes, will it be effective enough to connect to Olinuxino and use an internet connection?



Thanks!

[mbergmann]

Hi Rubin,

in general you can connect more than one device to one I2C bus. Simply make sure the devices use different addresses. We do this with our iMX233 based audio player: The FM radio and the accelerometer are connected to the same I2C interface.

But this may have some disadvantages because there could be a problem when one device interrupt occurs and an I2C transaction with the second device is in progress (or the other way around). Your device may generate a lot of data so this is very probable.

Why do you want to connect your Ethernet modules via I2C. I use a Apple USB-Ethernet cable on my iMX233-Olinuxino and it works out of the box without problems within Linux.

What software do you want to use? Linux? Bare Metal? Do you thought about the driver?

Regards

Mike

[Rubid]

Hi Mike,
thank you for your time.

I want to make a dual ethernet board using an easy-to-solder SOC, and I thought that iMX Olinuxino Micro will be a good point to start. For me, the USB-to-ETH 3$ dongle works also without any problems, but I don't think that soldering an USB hub (chip) and then USB-to-ETH chip is a very good idea.

The first iMX SoC that has a dual ethernet is iMX288, but it's BGA.