It is possible to use SPI and I2C on Efika? Some time ago I have talked to Thomas from bplan, he has said that "SPI and I2C are available via solder pads". Is this correct?

Reading this topic it seems like somebody had already tried to reach the PSC6 pins under the board, but no one had confirmed that it had been done successfully.

These features would be REALLY useful for us.

Thanks

Giammarco

Whoops :D

You can use I2C using the two very prominent solder pads on the underside of the board; they're meant for CAN but you can configure the bus at the firmware level and post a device tree entry that will enable Linux to pick it up. I can provide you with that code if you like.

As for the missing pins on PSC6, this should help;



It is not as easy to solder as the CAN/I2C bus, but it's possible. You can do some clever poking and hacking and get a full SPI and I2C connector on the 9x9 solder grid on the board if you wish, however this precludes using a hard disk..

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Matt Sealey

(Cough) Yes, of course... :-)

We'll try it and let you know.

Thanks a lot

Giammarco

Hello Giammarco,

What's up about this ? Any success to get a working SPI/I2C bus working ?

By the way, what is the bandwith of the SPI port?

Czk.

By my calculation you can run the SPI bus at ~33Mbit/s (this is a raw rate assuming you can transfer something on every clock cycle, which may or may not actually be possible).

This is more than enough to run an 802.11g wireless module, for example.

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Matt Sealey

Hi, sorry for the late response.

We have not tried to make it work as the project has been put aside, probably we'll be trying in the next few weeks. We'll post here some results/benchmarks when available.

Regards

Giammarco

This kind of chip for example ?

http://www.st.com/stonline/products/lit ... lc4550.htm

Czk

Yes just like that or just like this

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Matt Sealey

There are two ways to do SPI on mpc5200, using the dedicated SPI controller or a PSC. The PSC has to be 1,2,3 or 6.

The dedicated controller can only do about 100Kb/sec. The PSC is known to do 20Mb/sec and can probably do 40Mb/sec with some tweaking.

Working drivers for both methods are in my tree at http://git.digispeaker.com

You can get 802.11 for USB and PCI too. May be an easier solution.