Using SPI on Orange Pi 5

[Josh Blackburn]

I'm trying to use an SPI driven TFT display on the orange pi 5, but I'm stuck on enabling SPI in the first place. Looking at the pinout of the orange pi 5 in its manual, it appears that SPI4...M0 is the only bus broken out to the pins. However, enabling "rk3588-spi4-m0-cs1-spidev" in the armbian-config menu does not seem to do anything, as no /dev/spi device exists after a reboot. Enabling any of the other spi hardware functions seems to work just fine, creating a /dev/spi device as expected, but none of the other spi busses are accessible through the pin header. I'm on Armbian 23.8.1 (image: Armbian_23.8.1_Orangepi5_bookworm_legacy_5.10.160.img). Has anyone used SPI on the Orange Pi 5 before?

[Werner]

Providing logs with 

armbianmonitor -u

 helps with troubleshooting and significantly raises chances that issue gets addressed.

[royk]

@Josh Blackburn Do you have the overlay files in?  /boot/dtb/rockchip/overlays/ 

Is the right prefix set in armbianEnv.txt?

Other overlays activated that uses the same pin?

Edited October 15, 2023 by royk

[Josh Blackburn]

@royk

I had apparently enabled UART3_M0 at some point, which does indeed conflict with SPI4_M0, disabling UART3 worked. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.

@Werner

Apologies, I will be sure to include that log in future posts.