Adding an Extra i2c bus to an Embedded ARM board running Linux

Usually having access to one i2c bus on your embedded board is enough, as you can chain lots of devices off of it. But what happens if you have two devices with the same i2c ID and you can't change that?

Some of my ECE471 students wanted to create a game for their final project that involved having two Wii nunchuks (i2c id 0x52). This was not possible with the gumstix board (or with a Raspberry-pi) as both only export one i2c bus by default.

After looking into things, I managed to eventually get it to work by setting up a bit-banged GPIO i2c bus on two spare GPIOs.

What I had to do:
Picture of my test-case. Both of those LED displays have i2c id 0x70. One is on the default gumstix i2c-3 bus, one is on the bitbanged i2c-7 bus made from GPIOs 146 and 147.



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