[Rock64] How to Communicate with a SPI Device?

[Yagi_Berra]

Armbianmonitor:

http://ix.io/1Jg8

 

I have a Rock64 v2.  For my project I wish to connect the board to an MCP3008 ADC chip via SPI so I can read some analog sensors.  Pretty straightforward.

 

But when I look at /lib/modules/4.4.178-rockchip64/kernel/drivers I see there are modules for i2c, usb, one wire, GPIO ... everything but SPI.  Am I out of luck?

 

ARMBIAN 5.75 stable Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS 4.4.178-rockchip64

 

[martinayotte]

34 minutes ago, Yagi_Berra said:

But when I look at /lib/modules/4.4.178-rockchip64/kernel/drivers

Maybe you should look at NEXT or DEV builds instead of Legacy ...

[Yagi_Berra]

I switched to Nightly, that didn't help.  But I see on github that ayufan has mainline kernels that appear to have SPI in them.  I'll read up on how to do that and give it a try.  Thanks.

[martinayotte]

9 hours ago, Yagi_Berra said:

I switched to Nightly, that didn't help.  But I see on github that ayufan has mainline kernels that appear to have SPI in them.

Armbian builds are based on Ayufan's branch. The spidev.ko module is present in DEV images. But you need to enable SPI in DeviceTree.

 

[Yagi_Berra]

On 5/17/2019 at 7:29 AM, martinayotte said:

Armbian builds are based on Ayufan's branch. The spidev.ko module is present in DEV images. But you need to enable SPI in DeviceTree.

 

 

This suggests I should be able to do a DT overlay with 

sudo enable_dtoverlay spi0 spi@ff190000 okay

but the enable_dtoverlay command is not found.  BTW I'm a maker, not a developer, so if it seems I'm floundering here, I am :-)  It would be really sweet if the armbian-config utility included an "interfaces" option similar to what the RPi has, where you can simply toggle GPIO, SPI, i2C, etc on and off.

[martinayotte]

8 hours ago, Yagi_Berra said:

but the enable_dtoverlay command is not found.

This is not the way Armbian implemented overlays.

They are activated using parameters in /boot/armbianEnv.txt

Take a look at https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Allwinner_overlays/

 

But beware that current overlays for Rockchip are not as complete as for AllWinner SoC...

[trohn_javolta]

Sry to revive this but is it currently possible to enable spi with the current buster image or still only in dev or next images?

If yes, how?

I tried enabling via armbian-config and rebooted but ls dev/spi* shows nothing.

 

I'd like to control ws2812 led's via gpio spi.