The SPI tools

In complete analogy to the I²C case, even for SPI, we have some basic tools to manage it. However, as stated earlier, this time, these tools are not into a dedicated Debian package, but they are stored directly in the Documentation/spi/ directory of Linux's sources repository. Honestly, these SPI tools offer a poor support against the I²C counterpart. However, they can be used for basic functionalities and taken as examples to build our own programs.

As shown here, the available programs are just two:

$ ls Documentation/spi/*.c
Documentation/spi/spidev_fdx.c  
Documentation/spi/spidev_test.c

Both of them can be compiled on the host PC (or directly on our embedded kits) using the following command:

$ make CC=arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc 
       CFLAGS="-Wall -O2" spidev_fdx spidev_test
arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc -Wall -O2 spidev_fdx.c   -o spidev_fdx
arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc -Wall -O2 spidev_test.c   -o spidev_test

Note

Of course, if we decide to compile them natively, the CC...