 This week's IonMPI is from NXP, Lydia. What is this week's IonMPI? Okay, well, I've got a bridge to sell you. No, it's, well, I mean, technically, yes. This week's IonMPI is from NXP and it is the, let's get the part number right, SC-18-IM-704. You are to I-squared-C bridge. That's not a bridge too far. We're not burning bridges here. We're going to make bridges. You're really good at co-host. You got the good, you got the, the good jokes. All right, so this is the, as I said, the SC-18-IM-704, long part number. This is a 16T SOP chip that is a RS2, sorry, a TTL UART to I-squared-C plus 8 GPIO converter bridge. So you send it UART data and it will perform I-squared-C commands on the other side. It also comes as a handy dandy RS232 ready to go UART board. So this has a plus minus 10 volt RS232 port, has the chip and some circuitry, some LEDs. This is a valve board, but I'll say actually this board could come in quite useful if you have a computer that is so old or some sort of robot that's so old it doesn't have a USB port at all and it just has RS232. This is ready to go. Dev board that you just plug in directly and it gives you some GPIO and I-squared-C. So this chip is a, one of many chips. There's a lot of chips in this family. This is a UART to I-squared-C bridge. And, you know, NXP is interesting. It's one of the only companies that makes these bridges because I've looked into this and they make like, you know, like UART to one wire or UART to SPI or I-squared-C, like all sorts of combos. And this has, you know, this chip inside that listens to, again, RS232 commands, controls the GPIO, controls the I-squared-C controller. And the nice thing is, you know, NXP, you know, which used to be Philips, wrote the I-squared-C specification. So you know it's going to work well. I didn't see any mention of clock stretching, but it does definitely support repeated start, which I'll show in a moment. So this is actually an update to a previous product. I think it goes a little bit faster and it's a little bit more solid. It has like a timeout system. You know, basically you can send ASCII data over UART, which means, you know, the nice thing about this is that no matter what computer you have, if you have like a PC104 board or some like ancient, even like a 386 or a 46, you're going to be able to get to the UART and send data. So it could be also interesting for people doing retro computing, if you want to like connect something that's so old that only has RS232 as a, you know, it's so non-standard. It only has UART or RS232. You could connect your I-squared-C sensors to it. And the great thing about, you know, I-squared-Cs are so many sensors available. So here are some specifications. I like that it has five-volt tolerance on the input pins. The UART is standard 8N1. There's a 256-byte TX and RX-5O, which is handy, especially once in a while. You've got sensors or devices that really need very long messages sent back and forth. The UART, I think, has auto-bot detection. And I think you can also program the bot rate and go up to half a megabit per second. One multi-master bus controller and eight GPIO. And this is the structure. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. There's RX-TX as you expect. Power it, reset it. And then, you know, the GPIO pins I thought would be handy, not just, of course, if you want to control a relay, but say you want to reset a chip. We have some I-squared-C sensors that sometimes need any reset them before you start talking to them. They act a little bit nicer. Or you could use address selection pins or maybe read a busy pin or an IRQ pin. So a couple things that could be useful for those GPIOs. And of course, you know, there's like nearly infinite number of I-squared-C devices. You can connect ADCs and DACs and expanders and every kind of sensor. We've got thermal cameras even that go over I-squared-C. You know, we've got extenders and expanders and etc, etc. So, you know, no matter what it is, what I like about having it support I-squared-C is that if you have something with a yord and you need like a DAC or, you know, a 24-bit ADC, you actually have a shot of connecting it if you have I-squared-C because, you know, I-squared-C, there's almost anything has that as a peripheral available. Like I said, it supports repeated start. So it's kind of handy because there are sensors that really need repeated start or right after right support, something that they thought of because they're NXP. And again, they wrote the spec. This is the format. So there's also, you know, there's commands for the GPIO port, there's commands for I-squared-C. What is nice is that yord's actually kind of a good protocol to use with converting to I-squared-C bridge because, you know, yord is asynchronous, but it's like you can send commands and I-squared-C is a truly synchronous protocol which can make parsing a little easier. Like you're not going to get random data coming back on the RX pin from the UR, you know, you'll send a command and you'll wait for the response because you send I-squared-C data and you get a response or you get a knack. Here's some example bytes. So they give you some, you know, if you want to read or write an SM bus register, pretty standard stuff you'd want to do. Also how to set the GPIO input output and value. This is the eval board which I actually picked up. I can also show it on the overhead real fast if you want to do that. Again, you know, I had these, it seemed a little ridiculous because it's like, you know, why would you have this gigantic, you know, RS232 port? But, you know, there's so many times I've had to interface with really old computers or devices and it's like they didn't have USB or they had one USB port but nothing else. They didn't have I-squared-C, you know, so many like industrial computers that I've seen only have an RS232 port. And this could be, you know, an easy way if you don't have USB. There are USB to I-squared-C converters that I've used but, you know, if you don't have I-squared-C, this is a solution and this will drop in work quite well. So, check this out. This USB port right here just for power, for convenience. You can also power it because RS232, of course, doesn't power. You can also power it, of course, through the pins over here. And you said bridges, so this is bridges. Yes. So I want to mention, if you're like, well, I don't really need you or to I-squared-C. I could use I-squared-C to SPI or SPI to I-squared-C or I-squared-C to you are. Worry not because NXPs that you covered, they've got like every kind of combo. Some of them have multiple URs or multiple buses, whatever, all available. So this is just one of the family which popped up on digikey.com slash new, which I recommend. But there are others in this family. So if you have, you want to add a UR to a device that has SPI or I-squared-C, that's actually pretty common need as well because a lot of times microcontrollers or micro, you know, or computers, microcontrollers or microcomputers only have one UR and sometimes you're like, I need a GPS and a cell module or something. You could use one of these bridges for that use case as well. Available on digikey? Well, it's not available right now, but it will be. I will say it's getting tougher to get devices that, so if you go back one, I did type in, so it looks like in two months they're going to get at least a thousand in stock. So if you order now, you'll get it in two months. In the meantime, you can design with it. Of course, if you need some samples immediately, contact digikey. They will hook you up with samples. Yeah, and we have a pretty good video. It's one of the better ones that a manufacturer makes, so we're going to play it. It's two minutes, but it's worth your time. Yes, covers the entire family. During device selection, the host and peripheral normally have matched communications protocols. Take, for example, this conference camera, the 24-bit DAC has either an I2C or a SPI interface which matches the embedded processor. However, there can be situations where in mid-production, there is a sudden long-term supply constraint. For example, in this case, the I2C DAC is no longer available, and it requires a permanent move to an SPI DAC. The easiest solution is to use a protocol bridge that translates the different protocols with minimal change to the embedded process of firmware. There is also a similar case where the embedded processor must be reused for new platforms due to extensive use of legacy firmware, but the interface of the peripheral required for the application is different. Again, the solution for this situation is the drop-in bridge that translates between protocols. NXP has an array of bridges that overcome the limitation of different protocols between the host and peripherals. These bridges easily convert between UART, I2C, and SPI buses. This allows greater design flexibility and the ability to retain the original design investment while providing faster time to market. This also allows the ability to link legacy systems to new systems. There are four types of bridges, with the first being this family of five I2C or SPI to UART bridges with different SPI speeds, number of downstream UART channels, and number of general purpose IOs. The next device is the SPI to I2C bridge, which allows the SPI to communicate to fast mode I2C peripherals and is multiple master capable. There are five general purpose IOs for things like LEDs and switches. The next device is the I2C to SPI bridge, which allows fast mode I2C to communicate to SPI peripherals. The three GPIO can be used for the chip select in SPI parallel architecture applications. The next device is the UART to I2C bridge, which allows UART communications using RS232 protocol to fast mode I2C peripherals and is multiple master capable. Hi, I'm SPI.