I'm working in a project and I need to send more than 32 bytes from Raspberry Pi 3 to Arduino and viceversa.
My first question is: Why this limit of 32 bytes on SMBus? There is some technical reason?
I can't find any good solution about this.
My second question is: Which is the best way to transfer more than 32 bytes between the 2 devices via I2C using SMBus or other? Using some kind of custom protocol?
An example is well accepted. Thanks in advance
Send 32 bytes at a time, in sequence.
Have a look at the TLV format for an easy way to make a custom protocol.
There are several python packages to help you set up an encoder and a parser, for example construct or Simple TLV Parser, but if you want to keep it simple, you can probably build your own in a few lines of code.
SMBus does have a 32 byte limit. I2C has no limit. It may be because SMBus has timeouts whereas I2C doesn't, but that's just me thinking out loud.
A solution is to use I2C rather than SMBus.
There are a variety of ways to use I2C rather than SMBus from Python.
As I wrote pigpio I will point out that one of the simplest is to use the pigpio Python module and the i2c_read_device and i2c_write_device methods.
