Interfacing the Microchip PIC18F Microcontroller Master Synchronous Serial Port (MSSP) to various I2C Devices

The Inter-Integrated Circuit or I²C (read as I square C) bus has been introduced in 1980 by Philips, and has become a de-facto world standard for data exchange between Microcontroller and various devices such as temperature sensor, ADC (analog to digital converter), DAC (digital to analog converter), I/O expander, EEPROM, and many more. With more than thousand different IC devices have been manufactured with an I²C-bus interface, making the understanding of the working principle of this I²C bus is an essential knowledge that has to be acquired by anyone who want to involve in the embedded world professionally or just as hobbyist.

In this project we will learn of how to use the powerful 8-Bit Microchip PIC18F14K22 microcontroller Master Synchronous Serial Port (MSSP) in the I²C master mode to control various I²C devices simultaneously

The I²C Bus Protocol

The I²C bus use master and slave communication principle which mean the slave will response to any master request and only one master or one slave could use the I²C bus at the time (half-duplex communication). Therefore the master and slave have to be connected known as “Wired OR” connection using the pull-up resistors for both the I²C serial data (SDA) and serial clock (SCL) as shown on this following picture.

Unlike the SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) slave devices, the I²C devices don’t have the chip select (CS) pin where the SPI master could simply drive the CS pin to logic “0” in order to communicate with the target SPI slave device, instead in I²C protocol the I²C master will transmit the I²C slave device unique address in order to communicate with it.

When the I²C bus is idle both of the SDA and SCL line will be logic “1”. When the I²C master want to start communicate first it will send the START signal by putting the SDA line to logic “0” then it start to send the 7-bit I²C slave address followed by 1-bit I²C bus transfer direction command (WRITE logic “0” or READ logic “1”). The 7-bits I²C slave address consists of the upper 4-bits (ID3, ID2, ID1, and ID0) whose are the device specific ID (identification) and encoded within each of the I²C slave device.

For more detail: Interfacing the Microchip PIC18F Microcontroller Master Synchronous Serial Port (MSSP) to various I2C Devices