Controlling I2C Devices from U-Boot

Finding I2C devices

If your processor has multiple I2C busses, you can set which one is used with the following command:

# Where <bus> is the number of the bus to select:
i2c dev <bus>
# Example - Select bus 0
i2c dev 0

To search for available devices use the following commands:

# Attempt to detect the addresses of all devices on the bus
i2c probe
# Check if a device is present, where <chip> is the address of the I2C device
i2c probe <chip>
# Example - Check if a device with address 0x50 is present
i2c probe 0x50

I2C addresses are typically 7 bits with the 8th bit indicating if the I2C operation is a read (0) or a write (1). U-Boot expects the address as just 7 bits, right alined within a byte. I.e. 0b0AAAAAAA, where A is an address bit. Different IC datasheets specify the I2C address in different ways. Some may specify the address left aligned with the read bit appended. I.e. 0bAAAAAAA0. In these cases, the datasheet address should be right shifted by one bit before using it for the U-Boot I2C commands. U-Boot automatically sets the read/write bit in the address field.

Reading from an I2C device

You can dump memory to the screen using the following commands:

# <chip> is the address of the I2C IC.
# <register_address> is the register within the I2C device that you wish to read
# <address_length> is either 0, 1, or 2. 0 = no address, 1 = 8 bit address, 2 = 16 bit address.
# <length> is the number of bytes to read from the I2C device.
i2c md <chip> <register_address>[.<address_length>] <length>
# Example 1 - Read 0x100 bytes starting at register 0x00, from device with address 0x51. Address is 1 byte. 
i2c md 0x51 0x00.1 0x100
# Example 2 - Read 0x1000 byte starting at register 0x0400, from device with address 0x34. Address is 2 bytes. 
i2c md 0x34 0x0400.2 0x1000
# Example 3 - Read a single byte from device with address 0x60. Don't send register address word.
i2c md 0x60 0x00.0 0x1

You can also read from the I2C device directly into memory using the following command:

# <register_address>, <address_length>, and <length> are as per the i2c md command.
# <memory_address> is the address in the processors memory to copy the I2C data to.
i2c read <chip> <register_address>[.<address_length>] <length> <memory_address>
# Example: copy into memory location 0x40000000, 0x80 bytes starting at register
# address 0x10 of the I2C device with address 0x50.
i2c read 0x50 0x10 0x80 0x40000000

Most devices have an auto incrementing read pointer, so after a register is read, the next read will be from the next register address.

Writing to an I2C device

You write to I2C device's registers directly using the following command:

# <chip> is the address of the I2C IC.
# <register_address> is the register within the I2C device that you wish to read
# <address_length> is either 0, 1, or 2. 0 = no address, 1 = 8 bit address, 2 = 16 bit address.
# <value> is the value to write to the register address.
# <length> is the number of bytes to write to the I2C device.
i2c mw <chip> <register_address>[.<address_length>] <value> <length>
# Example 1 - Write 0x1 byte with value 0xAA to register 0xE5 of the I2C
# device with address 0x28. Address is 1 byte. 
i2c mw 0x28 0xE5.1 0xAA 0x1