PiicoDev vs STEMMA compatability

Support Product Questions
1

HI team,

Is this device (and associated systems) electrically and ‘connectorially’ compatible with the PiicoDev framework?

cheers
Murray

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2

Hi Murray,

We’re working on a guide at the moment that covers which sensors and ecosystems are cross-compatible and where they are different. There’s a lot to unpack between the PiicoDev, STEMMA QT, Qwiic, Grove, and Gravity ecosystems but I can cover this sensor briefly.

The original STEMMA and the new STEMMA QT use different physical connectors.
STEMMA QT, Qwiic, and PiicoDev all use JST-SH connectors with the same pin order and I2C interface.
The main difference is in the libraries provided. Typically Sparkfun’s Qwiic will come with Arduino libraries, Adafruit’s STEMMA QT will come with circuitpython libraries, and our PiicoDev modules always use micropython libraries.

Provided your sensors all have unique addresses you should be fine to mix STEMMA QT, Qwiic and PiicoDev sensors all on the same I2C bus.

One warning however, Qwiic and PiicoDev are both strictly 3.3V devices, whereas STEMMA QT will always be 3.3 or 5V tolerant. So if you are mixing devices make sure your bus is running at 3.3V.

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3

Thanks Trent,

I knew about the 3v3 aspect, but thanks for clearing up the connector and pin order details.

Murray

p.s. I am considering this code base to be in C so that will be a new venture into the depths …

M

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4

Some devices may have libraries ported to Python and/or MicroPython, either by the manufacturer or a third party, so it’s worth searching PyPi/Github.

I use SparkFun’s Python library for this sensor with a Raspberry Pi.

But the availability of these libraries seems to vary on a per-device basis.

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5

Thanks Steven,

I am actually going to look through manufacturers specs and existing libraries and build a C library and program suite for the Raspberry Pi.

Already having some success with porting an existing module for determining sunrise/set time on the Pi 3 and Pi 4, since they have (so far) very complete Unix-ish support libs. ( I am doing first builds on my FreeBSD server, then transferring the code to the Pi’s and they run the same)

I might see if I can transfer the same codebase to the Pico, but that will be later.

cheers
Murray

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