1-wire Bus

To provide 1-Wire Bus Connections between various 1-Wire- and Hostdevices different connection methods can be used. They can be connected to a Host using a bus converter. USB, RS-232 serial port interfaces are popular solutions for connecting 1-Wire Devices to the Hostdevice. But 1-Wire devices can also be interfaced directly to Controllers from various vendors using a GPIO Pin.

This guide will only cover 1-Wire Bus Connections (as of Sep 13, 2019) up to the stable release v19.07.8. For newer Kernels (since v21.02.0) the Package “kmod-w1-gpio-custom” is no longer available. Therefore the Installation is a bit more extensive. The Device which got tested was a OrangePI PC+.

In order to use a GPIO for the 1-Wire bus, i.e. for using DS18B20 Sensors it is necessary to install several additional packages:

opkg update
opkg install kmod-w1 kmod-w1-master-gpio kmod-w1-gpio-custom kmod-w1-slave-therm

Configure the GPIO pin connected to the data line of the sensor. The Section “Software” in this howto describes how to determine the GPIO.

Create/Edit /etc/modules.d/55-w1-gpio-custom, replace 19 with the GPIO which you determined in the last step. You can include several bus definitions up to a maximum of four, i.e.:

echo "w1-gpio-custom bus0=0,19,0 bus1=1,20,0" > /etc/modules.d/55-w1-gpio-custom

The last Zero of the sequence means “not open-drain” and should be set to “0”.

After modifying the file /etc/modules.d restart, so that the kernel can load the modules.

When the 1-Wire bus is successfully set up, you should see in /sys/devices a directory called “w1_bus_master1”. A second bus will appear as “w1_bus_master2” and so on. Within this directory you will find a number of files including “w1_master_slaves_count” which shows the number of devices connected to the 1-Wire bus, and “w1_master_slaves” which contains a list of the device identifiers.

In case, it is a Sunxi Device and you like to connect e.g. Pin 29 (=PA7) Sunxi says:

(position of letter in alphabet - 1) * 32 + pin number

so the GPIO for PA7 would be ( 1 - 1) * 32 + 7 = 0 + 7 = 7 (since 'a' is the first letter). This results in the following configuration

echo "w1-gpio-custom bus0=0,7,0" > /etc/modules.d/55-w1-gpio-custom

To connect 1Wire Devices to a Host it is necessary to connect a Pullup Resistor of 4.7 kOhm between the Bus Line and the 3.3V VCC Line. On the Internet, other values ​​are given also, here it works well with 4.7kOhm and six DS18B20 Sensors.

It is also possible to operate the 1-Wire Bus with just the Gnd and Bus Lines, with the Sensors deriving power “parasitically” from the Bus Line. For further information, read the datasheet of the device.