Using 1-Wire

The Binho Nova Multi-Protocol USB Host Adapter can function as a Dallas 1-WIRE host device. This protocol can be configured to operate on any of the IO pins on the device, however it is especially convenient to use it on IO0 and IO2 as the internal pull-up resistor can be used thus eliminating the need for an external pull-up resistor.

The following table gives a brief overview of the available 1WIRE commands.

Feel free to jump ahead to the ASCII Command Set reference to learn the specifics of each command, or continue below to see an example of how to use these commands to achieve communication on the 1-WIRE bus.

Setting Up the 1-WIRE Bus

The first step in using the Binho Nova Multi-Protocol USB Host Adapter as a 1-Wire host is to put the adapter into 1-WIRE mode using the Device Operating Mode command.

+MODE 0 1WIRE
-OK

Now the host adapter is in 1-WIRE communication mode. The 1-Wire bus has no configurable settings, so all we need to do is decide which IO pin we want to use. Let's take advantage of the internal pull-up resistor on IO0:

1WIRE0 BEGIN 0 PULL
-OK

And just like that, we're ready to start communicating with 1-Wire devices on the bus.

Selecting a Target Device

Let's get things started off right by first resetting all the devices on the bus:

1WIRE0 RESET
-OK

With all the devices reset, it's now possible to begin the process of selecting the device that will be communicated with. Let's start a search for devices on the bus -- but before doing the search, let's make sure we start at the beginning of searching through the devices by reseting the search.

1WIRE SEARCH RESET
-OK

Alright, now let's begin the search:

1WIRE SEARCH
-OK

Let's see what the search found. We'll query the address to see what device was found:

1WIRE0 ADDR ?
-1WIRE0 ADDR 0x3A 0xE3 0x2B 0x46 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x8E

That's great - the exact device we were looking for! Now that we know the address of desired device is in the ADDR field, we can move ahead with sending and receiving data.

Sending and Receiving Data

Now let's get the device's attention and ready to interact with us. This is done by sending another RESET command:

1WIRE0 RESET
-OK

Now let's select the device we'll be communicating with -- recall that it's address is already in memory from the result of our SEARCH command.

1WIRE0 SELECT
-OK

Finally let's do some reading and writing:

1WIRE0 WRITE 90
-OK
​
1WIRE0 WRITE 255
-OK
​
1WIRE0 WRITE 0
-OK
​
1WIRE0 READ
-1WIRE READ 0xAA
​
1WIRE0 READ
-1WIRE READ 0x0F

That's all there is to it! Of course getting the transaction complete before any timeouts occur can be challenging when manually interacting with the devices on the bus using these commands, however this isn't an issue when scripting the interactions. When it comes to manually interacting with 1-Wire devices, we highly recommend using the WHR command. You can see how to do this in our video tutorial embedded below:

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Check out the examples section to see how to use 1-Wire in an automated way:

1-Wire is just one of the common protocols which utilizes just one signal for bi-directional communication. On the next page we'll look at Atmel's Single-Wire Interface which is another similar protocol.