BayTrail E3800 SMBUS drivers for Windows Embedded Standard 7 (WES7)

[DBres]

Hi all,

we're putting together a design that relies on a third party embedded board with limited IO and have been forced to use the SMBUS interface from the E3800. The target system will use WES7 and there are no obvious user-space interfaces to the SMBUS although an Intel SMBUS driver is listed in Device Manager.

So, a quick question, are there any drivers or documented user-space interfaces available to expose the SMBUS to user-space in WES7? Driving it in either SMBUS or I2C mode is fine as the attached devices would support either protocol.

Things I know so far:

• Some manufacturers provide APIs for SMBUS, eg Advantech have their SUSI drivers. Our supplier doesn't. :-(
• The Intel Embedded Drivers for Windows 7 package supports the 7 I2C peripherals, not the SMBUS peripheral.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Dave Breslin

[Gabriel_T_Intel]

Hello David,

Welcome to the Intel Embedded Community,

We are working in your case, we will contact you as soon as possible.

Regards,

Gabriel Thomas.

[DBres]

Hi Gabriel,

Thanks very much. I'm hoping that I've just missed something simple, otherwise we'll just need to write a driver for the device. Not the hardest thing in the world but we'd like to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Best regards,

Dave

[Adolfo_S_Intel]

Hello DaveBreslin

Intel doesn't provide an API or user space driver to manage the SMBus.

You might check the following resources that can be useful for developing the required driver:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/c4538e10-aa6c-4b83-b857-c3c39d2b43b0/smbus-clientsensor-class-driver?forum=windowssensorandlocationplatform https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/c4538e10-aa6c-4b83-b857-c3c39d2b43b0/smbus-clientsensor-class-driver?forum=windowssensorandlocationplatform

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/4c9fa903-6c76-44ac-bdf9-7a56d49635f5/smbus-driver-on-windows7?forum=wdk https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/4c9fa903-6c76-44ac-bdf9-7a56d49635f5/smbus-driver-on-windows7?forum=wdk

If you need additional Intel documentation for your application please let us know, and we will gladly provide it to you.

Best Regards,

Adolfo.

[DBres]

So, for info, here's how we avoided writing a driver:

We are only interested in extremely infrequent low speed transactions. So, rather than building a driver, we're accessing the device via DeviceIoControl() in kernel32.dll. This is working really well for us and we have had no issues. This is extremely inefficient versus a dedicated driver but in practical terms, it works for us.

Thanks to all,

Dave

[Gabriel_T_Intel]

Hello David,

Thanks for your update, we are glad the you solved this issue. Your feedback is helpful.

Regards,

Gabriel Thomas