Accessing SPI interface on Beaglebone Black [SOLVED]

[Armfun]

Hello All,

I recently moved from Angstrom over to Arch Linux on my Beaglebone Black. What a delightful distro!

I'm pretty new to Linux and I'm trying to get get the SPI side of life up and working. I can't find anything SPI-related (ie. spidev) in /dev and wondered whether Arch Linux has support baked in for SPI devices? Much fruitless searching on the Net has yielded nothing so far.

Any pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated! Forgive me if I'm overlooking something obvious...

Kind regards,

JM

[falstaff]

Hi JM,

The new kernel (3.8.x) which is ported for the BeagleBone Black (and also Arch Linux) has not enabled any SPI device by default. However, since the new Kernel supports Device Tree overlays and loading of these at runtime, you can enable SPI without recompiling the kernel:

http://hipstercircuits.com/enable-spi-with-device-tree-on-beaglebone-black-copy-paste/

--
falstaff

[Armfun]

Hi falstaff,

Much appreciate the feedback - many thanks! I did see the hipstercircuits post in my searching, but wasn't sure if the DT patching explained was compatible with the Arch Linux release since it wasn't mentioned in the article (Angstrom was mentioned several times, so I thought that it Angstrom-specific).

I'll give it a whirl and update this post with feedback.

Thanks again,

JM

[Armfun]

falstaff,

Some feedback: I installed the Device Tree Compiler (DTC) from the AUR. Version is DTC 1.3.0-g27cdc1b1-dirty. When I try to compile the DT overlay is complains with an error, saying that it doesn't understand the -@ option. I understand that this option is required in order to compile device tree *overlays*.

Is there another package in the AUR with a later version of the DTC that supports compilation of DT overlays?

TIA,

JM

[falstaff]

You need a DTC version which supports the overlay feature introduced by the BeagleBone developer. I just created such a package and tested it, see http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=5785.

[Armfun]

Hi falstaff,

Awesome! Thanks so much!

JM