Tutorial: Arduino and multiple push-wheel switches

This is an addendum to chapter forty of a series originally titled “Getting Started/Moving Forward with Arduino!” by John Boxall – a series of articles on the Arduino universe. The first chapter is here, the complete series is detailed here. Any files from tutorials will be found here.

Updated 24/11/2012

This article continues with the push-wheel switches introduced in chapter 40. In the previous article, we learned how to read the value of a single digit using the digital pins of our Arduino. With this instalment we will examine how to read four digits – and not waste all those digital pins in the process. Instead, we will use the Microchip MCP23017 16-bit port expander IC that communicates via the I2C bus. It has sixteen digital input/output pins that we can use to read the status of each switch.

Before moving forward, please note that some assumed knowledge is required for this article – the I2C bus (parts one and two) and the MCP23017.

We first will describe the hardware connections, and then the Arduino sketch. Recall the schematic used for the single switch example:

When the switch was directly connected to the Arduino, we read the status of each pin to determine the value of the switch. We will do this again, on a larger scale using the MCP23017. Consider the pinout diagram:

We have 16 pins, which allows four switches to be connected. The commons for each switch still connect to 5V, and each switch contact still has a 10k pull-down resistor to GND. Then we connect the 1,2,4,8 pins of digit one to GPBA0~3; digit two’s 1,2,4,8 to GPA4~7; digit three’s 1,2,4,8 to GPB0~3 and digit four’s 1,2,4,8 to GPB4~7. For demonstration purposes we are using the Gravitech 7-segment shield as reviewed in the past.

Now how do we read the switches? All those wires may cause you to think it is difficult, but the sketch is quite simple. When we read the value of GPBA and B, one byte is returned for each bank, with the most-significant bit first. Each four bits will match the setting of the switch connected to the matching I/O pins.

For example, if we request the data for both IO banks and the switches are set to 1 2 3 4 – bank A will return 0010 0001 and bank B will return 0100 0011. We use some bitshift operations to separate each four bits into a separate variable – which leaves us with the value of each digit. For example, to separate the value of switch four, we shift the bits from bank B >> 4. This pushes the value of switch three out, and the blank bits on the left become zero. To separate the value for switch three, we use a compound bitwise & – which leaves the value of switch three.

Below is a breakdown of the binary switch values – it shows the raw GPIOA and B byte values, then each digit’s binary value, and decimal value:

So let’s see the demonstration sketch :

And for the non-believers … a video demonstration:

So there you have it. Four digits instead of one, and over the I2C bus conserving Arduino digital I/O pins. Using eight MCP23017s you could read 32 digits at once. Have fun with doing that!

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