I2CMini: Low Cost USB to I2C Board for Quick Testing

I2CMini is a tiny USB to I2C Board designed and manufactured by Excamera Labs. It is a very useful tool for all embedded developers who are building products that has I2C devices and spend quite a lot of time evaluating them.

Evaluation phase is an important part for engineering design, tools which makes evaluation faster are always required.

As this tools works on PC, it is very easy to test I2C devices with a fraction of time without even writing a single line of code.

Your non-programmer engineering team members can help you evaluate I2C devices with this tool.

I2CMini: Low Cost USB to I2C Board for Quick Testing 1

I2CMini uses FTDI USB-UART IC FT230X and Silicon Labs EFM8 an automotive grade 8-bit MCU for all the intelligent work like configurable I2C pullups, temperature sensing, detecting connected I2C device, etc.

Technical Specification

  • Open Source hardware
  • Fast transfer: sustained I²C transfers at 400 and 100 kHz
  • I²C pullups: programmable I²C pullup resistors, with automatic tuning (1.1K, 1.5K, 2.2K, 4.3K, 4.7K)
  • Dual I²C ports(same I2C bus): a castellated .1″/2.54mm header, plus a Qwiic standard connector
  • Jumpers: color coded Qwiic jumper included, for instant connection
  • 3.3 V output: output levels are 3.3 V, all are 5 V tolerant, can supply 270 mA Max.
  • Supports all I²C features: 7- and 10-bit I²C addressing, clock stretching, bus arbitration
  • Usage reporting: reports uptime, temperature, and running CRC of all traffic
  • Flexible control: GUI, command-line, C/C++, and Python 2/3 host software provided for Windows, Mac, and Linux
  • Dimensions: 61 mm x 49 mm x 6 mm
  • Computer interface: USB 2.0, micro USB connector

More information about I²CMini can be found in the English User Guide, Chinese User Guide.

GUI Software

For Windows, download the latest installer here.

I2CMini: Low Cost USB to I2C Board for Quick Testing 2

For Mac, and Linux, install the driver from Python with:

  pip install i2cdriver

and run the GUI as i2cgui.py.

From where to buy I2CMini

I2CMini was launched on Crowd Supply crowd funding platform but available with many distrubutors like:

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.