I2C: Raspberry Pi (Master) read Arduino (Slave) - perl

Question

I would like to read a block of data from my Arduino Mega (and also from an Arduino Micro in another project) with my Raspberry Pi via I2C. The code has to be in Perl because it's sort of a plug-in for my Home-Automation-Server.
I'm using the Device::SMBus interface and the connection works, I'm able to write and read single Bytes. I can even use writeBlockData with register address 0x00. I randomly discovererd that this address works.
But when I want to readBlockData, no register-address seems to work.
Does anyone know the correct register-address, or is that not even the problem that causes errors?
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

First off, which register(s) are you wanting to read? Here's an example using my RPi::I2C software (it should be exceptionally similar with the distribution you're using), along with a sketch that has a bunch of pseudo-registers configured for reading/writing.
First, the Perl code. It reads two bytes (the output of an analogRead() of pin A0 which is set up as register 80), then bit-shifts the two bytes into a 16-bit integer to get the full 0-1023 value of the pin:
use warnings;
use strict;
use RPi::I2C;
my $arduino_addr = 0x04;
my $arduino = RPi::I2C->new($arduino_addr);
my #bytes = $arduino->read_block(2, 80);
my $a0_value = ($bytes[0] << 8) | $bytes[1];
print "$a0_value\n";
Here's a full-blown Arduino sketch you can review that sets up a half dozen or so pseudo-registers, and when each register is specified, the Arduino writes or reads the appropriate data. If no register is specified, it operates on 0x00 register.
The I2C on the Arduino always does an onReceive() call before it does the onRequest() (when using Wire), so I set up a global variable reg to hold the register value, which I populate in the onReceive() interrupt, which is then used in the onRequest() call to send you the data at the pseudo-register you've specified.
The sketch itself doesn't really do anything useful, I just presented it as an example. It's actually part of my automated unit test platform for my RPi::WiringPi distribution.