I2C stands for Inter-Integrated-Circuit communications, it’s meant for short distances on a PCB or subassembly. But, hey, we’re engineers and we like to push the limits of technology, right? So why not try to have I2C run over a meter long cable, or even longer?
Well, if you try to do that, you’ll quickly find that the length of the cable adds capacitance and resistance that slows down the open-drain pullups used in I2C, making it hard to use 100KHz+ clock speeds. You could try slowing down your I2C clock to 1 KHz…or you could use an Adafruit LTC4311 active terminator like this one!
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