I2C keypad

This instructable explains how to interface with a 4x4 keypad over an I2C bus.

I started this project because I wanted some plug and play input and output modules for easy and fast prototyping of my electronics projects (mostly with PIC microcontrollers). Of course you can use leds and dip switches but they require lots of pins on your microcontroller and you only have binary I/O.

To solve this problem I decided to use I2C.
I2C is a 2 wire bidirectional bus to which addressable devices can be connected.
I had some I2C remote I/O expander chips laying around that I could use for this purpose.
You give them an address and then you can read or write to their 8 I/O pins.
I also recovered a 4x4 keypad from a broken telephone to be used as input device.
And I connected a 7 segment display to the I2C bus as an output device.

In a next iteration of the project I'll move the components to PCB.

Step 1: Components

Required components:

-1x PCF8574  I2C chip (remote 8-bit I/O expander for I2C-bus)
-1x 4x4 Keypad
-2x 2,2 kOhm pull-up resistors
-1x PIC18F4550 (or other programmable I2C master device)

Optional components (depends on output):

-1x PCF8574  I2C chip
-1x 7 segment display
-7x 330 Ohm resistor
-1x serial to usb dongle

Comments

[tinker234]

wow nice looks good

[Ender2007]

Very nice and usefull project.
Thanks.

[hobbyman]

Hello, nice project. Thanks for sharing,
I just wondered why you didn't use the hardware I2C port of pic 18f4550?

[Synck]

I did use the hardware I2C port.
RB0 is the data line and RB1 is the clock line as stated in the datasheet page 14.

[janw]

Very nice instructable! Where did you get that 4*4-keypad?

[djmachet]

um it says in the initial blurb that he got the keypad from an old phone

[janw]

Oooooooooooops, didn't see that.