SPI

From Wikipedia:

The Serial Peripheral Interface bus (SPI) is a synchronous serial communication interface specification used for short distance communication, primarily in embedded systems. The interface was developed by Motorola and has become a de facto standard. Typical applications include sensors, Secure Digital cards, and liquid crystal displays.

SPI devices communicate in full duplex mode using a master-slave architecture with a single master. The master device originates the frame for reading and writing. Multiple slave devices are supported through selection with individual slave select (SS) lines.

ECSPI

From the NXP iMX 6 Quad/Dual Reference Manual:

The Enhanced Configurable Serial Peripheral Interface (ECSPI) is a full-duplex, synchronous, four-wire serial communication block. The ECSPI contains a 64 x 32 receive buffer (RXFIFO) and a 64 x 32 transmit buffer (TXFIFO). With data FIFOs, the ECSPI allows rapid data communication with fewer software interrupts. The figure below shows a block diagram of the ECSPI.

Key features of the ECSPI include:

• Full-duplex synchronous serial interface
• Master/Slave configurable
• Four Chip Select (SS) signals to support multiple peripherals
• Transfer continuation function allows unlimited length data transfers
• 32-bit wide by 64-entry FIFO for both transmit and receive data
• Polarity and phase of the Chip Select (SS) and SPI Clock (SCLK) are configurable
• Direct Memory Access (DMA) support
• Max operation frequency up to the reference clock frequency.

The ECSPI supports the modes described in the indicated sections:

• Master Mode
• Slave Mode
• Low Power Modes

For more detailed information look at the Chapter 21 of the iMX 6 Quad/Dual Reference Manual

UDOO QUAD/DUAL SPI channels

UDOO QUAD/DUAL exposes 2 ECSPI channels:

	MISO	MOSI	CLOCK	SS0	SS1	SS2	SS3
ECSPI_1	45	37	36	46	31	53	47
ECSPI_2	50	51	52	34	31	53	47
ECSPI_5	3	5	2	4	9	8	-

By default the SPI buses are not enabled and their pins are configured as GPIO. In order to enable ECSPI, follow this guide.

ECSPI 1

ECSPI 1 is a full SPI, including Select Signals (SS0, SS1, SS2).

ECSPI 2

ECSPI 2 is a full SPI, including Select Signals (SS0, SS1, SS2).

ECSPI 5

ECSPI 5 has only six signals exposed (MISO, MOSI, SCLK, SS0, SS1, SS2), and many of them are shared with SD1.

Use

SPI is used by many sensor chips, flash memories, displays and other perifericals following a master-slave with a single master. UDOO QUAD/DUAL supports master mode only on its Enhanced Configurable SPI (ECSPI). The protocol consist of four main signals:

• MISO: Master Input Slave Output
• MOSI: Master Output Slave Input
• SCLK: Serial Clock
• SS: Slave Select

If you want to simply use it from a user application, just enable the ecspi{X} peripherical from the Device Tree Editor and use the spidev module to interact with it. In order to reduce conficts with other devices, SPI buses enabled from the Device Tree Editor have only SS0 signal as chip select.

Example

From Linux-Sunxi website:

char *buffer;
char buf[10];

file=spi_init("/dev/spidev0.0"); //dev

buf[0] = 0x41;
buf[1] = 0xFF;
spi_write(0xE6,0x0E,2,buf,file); //this will write value 0x41FF to the address 0xE60E

buffer=(char *)spi_read(0xE6,0x0E,4,file); //reading the address 0xE60E

close(file);