Can no longer reference an I2C address which isn't present.

I have an application running on Pi3/ArchLinuxARM (using ABE Python libraries maybe six to twelve months old).

I am moving the application to Pi4/RasPiOS Lite, and up to date ABE libraries..

I find that a call such as "iop1=IOPi(0x20)" now fails if address 20 doesn't exist on the I2C bus whereas it didn't cause a problem previously. Clearly, I will be able program around this, but it caught me out.

Is this change because of Pi3 -> Pi4 (unlikely), ArchLinux -> Debian (possible) or updated libraries (most likely)?

The error reported is:

 Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "Main.py", line 57, in <module>
     main()
   File "Main.py", line 21, in main
     Initialise.Load()
   File "/home/automate/Initialise.py", line 89, in Load
     exec(string[1])
   File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/IOPi/IOPi.py", line 117, in __init__
     self.__bus.write_byte_data(self.__ioaddress, self.IOCON, self.__conf)
 OSError: [Errno 121] Remote I/O error

Hello Peter

I have made some changes to the IO Pi library over the last year, mostly optimizing the code and adding more validation and error handling.

Having said that the "OSError: [Errno 121] Remote I/O error" message is not one of the changes I have made and I believe it is a part of the I2C class that comes with Python so the error showing up now could be due to the move from ArchLinux to Debian.

You can find a list of the changes that I made to the IO Pi library in the change log in our GitHub repository. The last time I made a change to the library that would break backward compatibility was in 2017 when the IOPi class was renamed from ABE_IOPi.

Thanks for that info, Andrew. When I have the new environment fully debuged and running live, I will have a go at updating the ABE librariy on the ArchLinux (current live) system, just to prove your deduction.

This would suggest that there is some customisation of (fairly) standard libraries for different distributions.