8086net / pico-sexa-uart-bridge

Raspberry Pi Pico UART-USB-I2C bridge (USB to six UARTs and one I2C)

Raspberry Pi Pico USB-UART and I2C Bridge

This project converts the Raspberry Pi Pico(or any RP2040) into a USB to 6 UART and I2C board with activity LEDs.

Supporting hardware, the "PicoUART6" is available on Tindie and eBay.

The 6 USB UART are compatible with the builtin USB CDC class drivers in Linux, macOS, and >= Windows 10.

The I2C interface requires an i2c-tiny-usb driver. On Linux copy the "90-PicoUART6.rules" file into "/etc/udev/rules.d/", run "sudo udevadm control --reload" and then unplug/replug the Pico. Running "i2cdetect -l" will then show the i2c-tiny-usb bus you need to use in your application.

History

This expands JoeSc's project to add activity LED for each UART which itself expands Noltari's project to add 4 additional UARTs using the pico PIOs. And expands on harrywalsh's project to provide better SEO and remove some data loss when using all 6 UARTs concurrently.

It then has Nicolai-Electronics's project for i2c-tiny-usb support merged in.

Disclaimer

This software is provided without warranty, according to the MIT License, and should therefore not be used where it may endanger life, financial stakes, or cause discomfort and inconvenience to others.

Raspberry Pi Pico Pinout

The pinout can easily be modified in uart-i2c-bridge.c but below is the default

Raspberry Pi Pico GPIO	Function
GPIO0 (Pin 1)	UART0 TX
GPIO1 (Pin 2)	UART0 RX
GPIO2 (Pin 4)	UART0 Activity LED
GPIO4 (Pin 6)	UART1 TX
GPIO5 (Pin 7)	UART1 RX
GPIO3 (Pin 5)	UART1 Activity LED
GPIO8 (Pin 11)	UART2 TX
GPIO9 (Pin 12)	UART2 RX
GPIO6 (Pin 9)	UART2 Activity LED
GPIO12 (Pin 16)	UART3 TX
GPIO13 (Pin 17)	UART3 RX
GPIO7 (Pin 10)	UART3 Activity LED
GPIO16 (Pin 21)	UART4 TX
GPIO17 (Pin 22)	UART4 RX
GPIO10 (Pin 14)	UART4 Activity LED
GPIO20 (Pin 26)	UART5 TX
GPIO21 (Pin 27)	UART5 RX
GPIO11 (Pin 15)	UART5 Activity LED
GPIO26 (Pin 31)	I2C SDA
GPIO27 (Pin 32)	I2C SCL
GPIO14 (Pin 19)	I2C Activity LED
GPIO15 (Pin 20)	Power LED