I've spent weeks trying to figure out how I broke my Raspberry Pi. Actually... How I broke two of them.
Well, I didn't actually break them. Just the sensors attached to them.
Well, I didn't actually break them, it's just that they weren't reading correctly.
Here's the story:
I've been working on a couple of I2C sensors to tie into my Raspberry Pi. The idea is to read the sensors at specific intervals, log the data, and then serve up some nice graphs. I've been using the BMP085 temperature and pressure sensor, the TSL2561 light sensor, and the TMP102 temperature sensor (All those links go to the Adafruit forums specific to those sensors and the Raspberry Pi).
A group of us were collaborating on the TSL2561 (Hi, csalty!), when I upgraded to the newer version of Adafruit_I2C and the Adafruit_BMP085. That's where everything went sideways.
I spent days looking at the datasheet and the Adafruit_BMP085 code. Some of the stuff just doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't make sense to the point that I wrote the devs saying "This is broken".
It's not, and that's pretty embarrassing. It really looks like something in the Adafruit_I2C code changed how it pulls the information from the BMP085. If you're looking for solutions, enable the debug mode, and check your calibration information. Mine was VERY off using that version of Adafruit_I2C (Impossible temperatures and unstable in nature reading 200 degrees one minute negative 70 the next). Once I switched some of the functions to the older version, things went well. The kludge-version of Adafruit_I2C that I'm using is listed here: Modified Adafruit_I2C.py.
I also made a very specific change to the Adafruit_BMP085.py code. I allowed the code to pass a specified bus number down the "stack" to the I2C code. By default it does not specify a bus, and will allow the new I2C software to determine which version of the Raspberry Pi is being used, selecting the default GPIO header bus. This way, all you have to do is call the BMP085. It will fill in the default address, the default mode, and the default bus. If you (like me) are using both I2C buses on your Raspberry Pi, then you MUST specify when you are using the "non-standard" bus. The way the Adafruit_I2C.py code is written, it will only look for the version of the board and assign the "default" bus. It has no way of knowing which bus you want to use.
I also set up the BMP085 code to pass the debug state down the code stack. I figure if you're interested in debugging the BMP085, you're also going to be interested in debugging what is happening with the I2C code. As part of the BMP085 calibration data, I also set it up to print out which I2C bus is being specified.
I need to make these changes to the TSL2561 code and the TMP102 code. Both of these sensors appeared to be working just fine with the new Adafruit_I2C.py code (I've checked to make sure).
I've changed my project a little bit. Now I'm running two parallel sets of sensors on the two different buses. Each bus has a TSL2561 and a BMP085 sensor. I'm logging the temperature, light level, and pressure every sixty seconds or so. I'm manually able to generate all kinds of charts, but for right now I'm going to keep it manual. I'll let the system run while I'm at work this week (four days), and if everything looks OK, I'll work on re-writing the webpage code.
