i2c-tools for EEPROM vs. eeprog

rksyeung · 03-30-2018, 03:13 AM

I was trying to use i2c-tools (in particular, i2cget, i2cset, i2cdump etc.) to access a 24C16K EEPROM, and could get it to work. Firstly the device addressing is a little confusing. From schematic, it looks like address is 0xAE. From data sheet (for Atmel), it seems like MSB 4 bits must be 1010b (i.e. 0xA), and following 3 bits are to define one of the 8 pages (256B each page) for a total of 2KB.

I did some googling. Some answers provided seemed to be inconsistent with the i2cset command syntax; some people tried to specify 2 bytes worth of data address while command asks for only 1 byte.

I'd like to know your experience with these i2c-tools (version 3.1.2). Should I give up on it, and try to get the later driver (4.x) with eeprog in it? And other than EEPROM related issue, how is your experience with this tool for other I2C devices in general?

AwesomeMachine · 03-30-2018, 08:18 PM

I think much more important than the tools package is the board you're working with. If it implements the protocols correctly, the tools should work just fine. But if it's an oddball board then you might have problems. What are you working on exactly? Are you using an EEPROM programmer?

The ideal situation is to have the chip off the board in a socket on a programmer, and just use the programmer software to work with the EEPROM.

rksyeung · 03-30-2018, 08:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AwesomeMachine

I think much more important than the tools package is the board you're working with. If it implements the protocols correctly, the tools should work just fine. But if it's an oddball board then you might have problems. What are you working on exactly? Are you using an EEPROM programmer?

The ideal situation is to have the chip off the board in a socket on a programmer, and just use the programmer software to work with the EEPROM.

The board has an Intel Xeon-D processor. The EEPROM is on-board Atmel 24C16K I2C interface. The device has 2KB's worth of address space. The i2cget/i2cset etc expects an address of only 1 byte (0x0-0xff). So my understanding is this device would occupy 8 addresses (from 0xA0 to 0xAE); this doesn't seem to work. I'm checking the device address(es) with the 3rd party vendor (an eval platform). At the same time, I'm checking here (and google) to see overall usability of these tools.

AwesomeMachine · 03-30-2018, 08:50 PM

Like I said before, a lot has to do with how the protocols are implemented. The tools assume the protocols are implemented correctly. If they are, the tools work well. Another thing, 1 bit addressing probably won't work to address a 2kB space. So, I think it might be 2kbit address space.