Parallax Sells a BME680 Environment sensor but no SPIN
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It's curious that Parallax made a BME680 board but didn't provide a SPIN/PASM driver for it.
I think it would be hard to make something to sell that leaves out 90% of its user base.
For a C coder BOSCH provides a driver out of the box and just required adding some interface functions to make it work.
For SPIN or PASM that would be a different story. SPIN until recently didn't have floating point which is what the driver was coded for but also provides a fixed-point setup that leaves out the environment sensor if used.
In any case this is a nice product that provides a lot of feature function that can't be used by the SPIN community.
Mike
Comments
I was able to get some basics working, but with Bosch's "Use C or we don't support you" approach, I wasn't able to fully flesh it out. That was before floats were added to Spin2, so I may try again -- but it will be for the P2. Yes, I did try their fixed point routines -- I could never get the outcome to match their examples.
One other thing. I was using the P2 RTC module and found that the interrupt pin was tied to the I2C clock pin.
That didn't make sense to me as the board uses up all 8 GPIO pins and so using one of the other 6 pins would have work just fine.
Now I have to disable I2C to check the alarm with pullups enabled. Using another pin would have made it easy to use.
Mike
@JonnyMac , Yes I went down that rabbit hole with the BME280 when it first came out. Not fun.
Mike
I can share some insight...
Tip -- you might consider removing the SDA pull-up resistor anyway and make use of the Smart pullups where needed, and push-pull for the I2C bus. Doing that will increase the battery standby life from maybe a month to about 18 months. Might be handy for your outdoor system if that's going to be unpowered for long periods. (caveat: Those numbers are just from memory-- meant to be indicative of the standby life gain only). SDA resistor is the one closest to the IO header pin marked 0.
@VonSzarvas , Funny none of that is mentioned in the writeup for this device. Sounds like it would be a selling factor for its use although I seem to remember sharing pins with the micro SD and Flash not working out so well.
I think if you wanted to share a number of devices on one pin you would have put a STEMMA QT or QWiic connector on the board as it is small enough and works with multiple devices from several manufacturers.
Mike
Life is funny indeed.