System Management Bus

I know this question maybe outside the realm of this forum, but I couldn't think of anyplace else to ask. This is more of a PC/Microcontroller question.

My new motherboard has an SMBus interface on it which is essentially i2C. You can connect i2C/SMBus compatible sensors and they can be read by a program like Mother Board Manager.

It should be easy to use this I2c bus to communicate with a microcontroller. I was thinking of passing information to the computer, or passing computer status information to the uC to display on an LCD.

Unfortunately how to access the SMBus from a programming language like Visual Basic is just about impossible to find. It may also be that I'm a complete noob to Windows programming as well. There's a device driver already installed for it, but how do I access the device driver?

Anyone know what it would take to access the SMBus on the PC side?

its memory mapped, as such you can just read the memory, however its protected because the 386 CPU is running in protected mode, VB would make this whole process excruciatingly painful. Best bet would be to use C++, and you would either need a program like PortTalk (2nd time i've mentioned that today) or write your own device driver.

www.beyoundlogic.org for porttalk.

Then you just access certain memory locations. Simple realy. Only very damn hard caus each mobo has a differn't standard of interface.