RE: Consultation: connecting I2C/SPI devices to network

[Abdalla Ahmad via Tech-talk <tech-talk@aps.anl.gov>]

Exposing such communication protocols on the network requires writing a TCP or UDP server that is intermediate between the SPI or I2C port and the network, I think the best setup is the following:

• Have a single-board computer (BeagleBone, Raspberry Pi, etc.) that has available SPI or I2C ports.
• Write a TCP server that reads/write to the SPI or I2C and expose them via string commands received from Ethernet.
• Develop a stream device IOC that connects to the intermediate server.

 

If your system requires SPI, I wrote an SPI driver on the BeagleBone black that interfaces with AD7606-18 ADCs https://github.com/AbdallaDalleh/ad7606-spi the driver uses Linux system calls to talk with the on-board SPI port “/dev/spi1.0”.

 

Best Regards,

Abdalla Al-Dalleh

Control Engineer

SESAME

 

From: Tech-talk <tech-talk-bounces@aps.anl.gov> On Behalf Of Florian Feldbauer via Tech-talk
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2025 1:31 PM
To: tech-talk@aps.anl.gov
Subject: Re: Consultation: connecting I2C/SPI devices to network

 

Hey Gabriel,

 

I typically use a Raspberry Pi to readout devices via I2C.
For this task I wrote a small i2c device support module, that uses Stream Device + Asyn (https://github.com/ffeldbauer/drvAsynI2C)

 

It does not make the I2C communication directly accessible on network, but it makes all the data points accessible via CA/PVA through an EPICS IOC.

 

If you really want to have a I2C to Ethernet bridge, I would most likely use a RP2040 or ESP32 microcontroller and implement a simple UDP or TCP protocol exchanging either ASCII or raw "strings" containing the data.

 

HTH,
Florian

 

 

On 12/15/25 10:43, Gabriel Fedel via Tech-talk wrote:

Dear tech-talk,

 

Any experience or suggestion of bringing hardware communicating I2C and/or SPI to be accessible on network? 

Maybe even some EPICS integration experience on them ?

 

Thanks in advance

-- 

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