What Communication?

So how do you talk to a chip, for example a DAC (Digital to Analog Converter)?

Most integrated circuits implement what is called "I2C" or Inter-Integrated Circuit bus communication. You can find a good description here.

Suffice to say that Arduino has been designed to communicate to other devices through the I2C bus.


The Arduino project also has a library the "WIRE LIBRARY" that facilitates communication over I2C. You can find information about the library here. It provides a set of high level calls:

• begin()
• begin(address)
• requestFrom(address, count)
• beginTransmission(address)
• endTransmission()
• send()
• byte available()
• byte receive()
• onReceive(handler)
• onRequest(handler)