5-way Tactile Switch

Qwiic System
1

Is it possible to connect the Sparkfun 5-way tactile switch (below) to a pro micro c via qwiic?

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10063

Which wires would I be soldering to which pads? And would I be able to program it like any other joystick? Thanks!

2

Hi, thanks for posting.

You could use the Qwiic button schematic as a reference for how you could accomplish what you are looking for: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15932

The Attiny84 has plenty of pins to work with and is i2c capable, hence why we use it on some of our qwiic products: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11232

You would program the Attinny84 chip to have the tactile button behave the way you need it to as long as you are within the limitations of the chip.

I hope this helps. .

3

I see. I was hoping to just solder a qwiic connecter wire to the bottom pads and then plug it into the promicro but the attinny98 makes sense.

Ordering the 5 way switch and the qwiic button breakout board. Thanks for your help.

4

Sadly it’s not as simple as just soldering on a Qwiic connector.

The device you want to convert to qwiic is just a bunch of regular old switches, it doesn’t have any intelligence or a way to communicate over the I2C bus that qwiic is built on. At a minimum you’re going to need some sort of micro controller to read your switches and then convert that into data packets that are suitable for transmission over the qwiic bus.

This is going to mean writing code that does the translation and communicates via I2C, and that’s going to take some work but is possible. Arduino has a small tutorial that scratches the surface of what you would need to write codewise, you might check that out.

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Libr … sterWriter

If you want something simple, five Qwiic Button Breakouts that all have unique I2C address programmed would do the trick but it’s a bit bulky and cumbersome.

Some other options would be the [SX1509, or sparkfun’s [Qwiic GPIO. Both could be used to convert your switch to Qwiic.](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/17047)](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13601)