Cannot set up I2C running on Ubuntu (transfer timed out)

Question

I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 GB RAM running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. It is packed in an Argon One case.

I'm trying to use a Waveshare BME280 Temperature/Pressure sensor that I already used before on a Raspberry Pi Zero with Debian (so I know it works). Somehow I cannot get it to work on Ubuntu.

I enabled I2C using raspi-config, rebooted the Pi and connected the sensor. With lsmod | grep i2c I can see this

i2c_bcm2835            20480  0

When running sudo i2cdetect -y 1 every "cell" takes about 2 seconds and syslog is flooded with i2c-bcm2835 fe804000.i2c: i2c transfer timed out. The result is of course, "wrong"

     0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  a  b  c  d  e  f
00:                         -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
10: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
20: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
30: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
40: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
50: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
60: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
70: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Other people had this problem but somehow no solution worked for me.

Do you have any suggestion to fix it?

Answer 1

I had a script to control the fan of my argonone case and this was keeping the i2c interface busy. Once I uninstalled that and cleaned a little bit the environment I was able to get back the sensor to work. It didn't work immediately and honestly I don't know what I did exactly to make it work again but the mentioned script was definitely part of the problem .