I2C Bridge on FPGA to Facilitate Vast Connection of Heterogeneous IoT Devices in Agriculture Applications

The integration of sensor devices into an IoT network is experiencing significant growth. Along with the rise of several application demands, it is necessary to continuously develop new designs to accommodate these changes. To facilitate the integration of new features into the IoT system, the electronics of end - node devices are comprised of the parts related to the Main board (MCU unit), various Radio - Frequency (RF) modules and other essential components. These include the peripheral units, designed specifically to meet the user's application requirements. The goal is to maintain a single Main Board for all devices, thereby reducing logistics management effort and costs. To this end, this paper presents a solution, tailored at consolidating the production parts diversity, within the Agriculture IoT applications domain, thereby streamlining manufacturing processes and enhancing logistics personnel productivity. The proposed approach revolves around the initialization of a communication protocol translator, between the Integrated Circuits (ICs) of Peripheral - Boards and the Main - Board, effectively simplifying the interface, across all productions. Finally, we design and test a software drive, to facilitate the integration at firmware level. Our energy efficient experiments prove the applicability of our proposed solution.