I hate I2C for several reasons. It's only two-wires bus, but for this reason it is insidious.
I usually use hw peripherals when they are available, because it's much more efficient and smart and because it's the only possibility in many cases. Actually we have MCUs with abundant UARTs, timers and so on, so there's no real story: choose a suitable MCU and use that damn peripheral. So I usually start using I2C peripherals available in MCUs, but I found many issues.
I have experience with AVR8 and SAMC21 by Atmel/Microchip. In both cases the I2C peripheral is much more complex than UART or similar serial lines. I2C Single Master, that is the most frequent situation, is very simple, but I2C Multi Master introduces many critical situations. I2C peripherals usually promise to be compatible with multi-master, so their internal state machine is somewhat complex... and often there's some bug or situations that aren't expected that leave the code stucks at some point.
I want to write reliable code that not only works most of the time, but that works ALL the time, in any situations (ok, 99%). So my first test with I2C is making a temporary short between SCL and SDA. In this case, I2C in SAMC21 (they named it SERCOM in I2C Master mode) hangs forever. The manual says to write ADDR register to start putting the address on the bus and wait for an interrupt flag when it ends. This interrupt is never fired up. I see the lines goes down (because START bit is putting low SDA before SCL), but the INTFLAG bits stay cleared forever. Even error bits in STATUS register (bus error, arbitration lost, any sort of timeout...) stay cleared and the BUSSTATE is IDLE. As soon as the short is removed, the state-machine goes on.
Maybe I'm wr "Note:? Violating the protocol may cause the I2C to hang. If this happens it is possible to recover from this state by a software reset (CTRLA.SWRST='1')."
I think the driver code should trust the hw, between them there's a contract, otherwise it's impossibile. For a UART driver, you write DATA register and wait an interrupt flag when a new data can be written in the register. If the interrupt nevers fire, the driver hangs forever. But I have never seen a UART driver that uses a timeout to recover from a hardware that could hang. And I used UARTs for many years now.
Considering all these big issues when you want to write reliable code, I'm considering to wipe again the old and good bit banging technique. For I2C Single Master scenario, it IS very simple: put data low/high (three-state), put clock low/high. The only problem is to calibrate the clock frequency, but if you a free timer it will be simple too.
What is the drawback of bit banging? Maybe you write a few additional lines of code (you have to spit off 9 clock pulses by code), but I don't think much more than using a peripheral and protect it with a timeout. But you earn a code that is fully under your control and you know when the I2C transaction starts and you can be sure it will end, even when there are some hw issues on the board.
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