I am looking for guidance on how to use the GPIO pins of the CP2102N carrier board. The four GPIO pins are available, but there aren’t any examples that I can find.
Pololu product page
The goal: plug a Windows PC into this board and use the serial out to talk to a TIC. There will be an additional TIC (and I want to use the GPIO for a relay) so using the USB on the TIC is not the best choice for me.
From what I can find, I have to use “Simplicity Studio” to configure the GPIO ports. This is a tiny bit scary, but OK. Then the next issue is what do I send to the board to trigger the GPIO output?
Has anybody done this?
Thanks for your help,
Henry
Hello, Henry.
Unfortunately, we do not have any specific examples that demonstrate how to use the GPIO pins. In case you did not find these resources already, the GPIO section of the CP2102N datasheet points to a couple of application notes that should have more information about using the pins, AN721: CP21xx
Device Customization Guide and AN223: Runtime GPIO Control for CP210x.
By the way, if possible, it might be easier to use the DTR or RTS pin to control your relay instead of using GPIO pins. Most serial APIs you would use on the PC have support for setting DTR and RTS.
- Patrick
Hello,
I’ll look at the documents again, but it seems to be geared towards C++ or something other than Python.
Using the DTR and RTS pins is pretty clever. Hopefully, PySerial has some support for that type of thing.
Henry
