The last few days I worked on the MCP23017 kernel driver and wondered about a good method to test my changes in a comfortable way. Fortunately I built myself an i2c-tiny-usb adapter some time ago, which is supported by mainline Linux. Thus any system with USB host support could be used for testing the above chip. My minimal test-setup can be seen in the image below. Basically I supplied 5V, Ground, SCL & SDA from the adapter to MCP23017, connected the low-active reset pin to 5V and the address-selection pins to Ground.
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Our hackerspace’s access-control-system (for unlocking the door) uses a few mcp23017 port expanders for input/output handling of different sensors and actors. When I started working on this, the mcp23s08 driver (which also supports the mcp23017) was not yet enabled in Debian’s arm build. I requested it to be enabled in Debian Bug #845064, which got recently fixed by Ben Hutchings. As a quick hack to solve the problem I took the driver and ripped it out of the kernel, so that I can build it externally.
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