A RS232 serial port driver for the I2C bus

The I2C bus is a bus system formerly designed by PHILLIPS INTERNATIONAL INC. for different ICs inside a Device to communicate to each other. It is today found (at least in a modified version, the SMBus) on every up-to-date Mainboard to control all these temperature- fan- and voltage gimmics and much other things. It is also used as a low-cost way to connect single ICs or devices to a PC with low hardware requirements.

The LM_Sensors package is a set of modules that drive a number of i2c bus devices. It is split in two packages. The i2c packages provides a set of "bus drivers", that is drivers for certain hardware (interface ICs or self-made adapters) to get an interface to a certain I2C bus. The lm_sensors package contains modules that communicate to different chips on a I2C bus, like LM75 thermometers.

Currently, in the LM_Sensors package only an interface for the parallel port exists which is usually occupied by the printer, but none for the serial port. There has been one in earlier days, before the LM_Sensors project was called LM_Sensors, that was maintained by Simon G. Vogl, but somehow it disappeared. So I took an old module from Simon's stuff and re-wrote it to fit into the current release of the LM_Sensors project. In principle this wasn't a great deal, I simply had to merge this module and the current i2c-elv.c module.

There have existed drawings for a hardware interface by Frederic Rible, but they also disappeared with Simon's driver. But after some search I found one of them in an old backup of my harddisc and was able to construct the interface. Now a new drawing, and hopefully soon pictures, of my interface can be found below.

Down here you can find my patch against the current LM_Sensors packages (version 2.6.0) and an elder version. The core module i2c-ser.c is content of the i2c package, the lm_sensors contains only minor changes in the autodetect routines.

i2c-2.6.0.diff

lm_sensors-2.6.0.diff

i2c-2.5.0.tar.gz

i2c-2.5.0.diff

lm_sensors-2.5.0.tar.gz

lm_sensors-2.5.0.diff

The hardware of the interface

Stefan Rutzinger, 01.09.2001