Turn on I2C on G2 18v15 w/o Windows?

Hello Forum,

Has anyone found a way to turn on I2C on a G2 18v15 if you don’t own a Windows computer (I have a Mac, Wine, RPi, Arduino’s, but no PC’s). The manual seems to say it requires running Windows only software, and though there is a serial interface, it doesn’t look like it has this functionality.

Thanks,
RipRock99

Hello.

It sounds like you’re referring to the High-Power Simple Motor Controller G2 18v15. The TTL serial interface cannot configure settings stored in the non-volatile memory such as the “Enable I2C” setting. The easiest way to configure the High-Power Simple Motor Controller G2 18v15 is using the Simple Motor Control Center G2 on a Windows PC. If you have no access to a Windows PC, you can use SmcG2Cmd (the command-line utility for the board) to change the settings. The smcG2Cmd comes packaged with the Simple Motor Control Center G2 software, but it is also part of our Pololu USB Software Development Kit (SDK), so you can find it separately there.

Once you have it, you can enable I2C by following this process:

  1. open a command-line utility
  2. run smcg2cmd --get-settings smcg2settings (with the board connected) to save a copy of the current settings as a text file
  3. open the settings file and change enable_i2c: false to enable_i2c: true
  4. save the changes to the settings file
  5. run smcg2settings --settings smcg2settings to load the settings from the file back to the board with the changes applied

Brandon