The Rasp­berry Pi SPI command-line util­ity, spincl, has been updated. Ver­sion 1.3.1 is now avail­able. iP Solu­tions orig­i­nally released the Rasp­berry Pi SPI util­ity in Feb­ru­ary, 2013 licensed under Open Source GNU GPLv3. This spincl update is cov­ered under the same license.

The fol­low­ing items are included in the update:

• This ver­sion was built with the bcm2835-1.25 library. All pre­vi­ous ver­sions were built with bcm2835-17.
• This ver­sion was tested on 2013-02-09 raspian wheezy. The 2012-10-28 raspian wheezy was used for all pre­vi­ous versions.

iP Solu­tions orig­i­nally cre­ated the Ser­ial Periph­eral Inter­face (SPI) command-line util­ity for the Rasp­berry Pi (www.raspberrypi.org) plat­form for the con­ve­nience of hard­ware debug and to indi­rectly add SPI func­tion­al­ity to script­ing lan­guages such as Bash and Python.

Although a C library exists for the Broad­com bcm2835 with an SPI Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming Inter­face (API) among other things, there are rea­sons to have a command-line util­ity, which can be invoked from a shell com­mand line or from within a script. A command-line util­ity allows easy test­ing and debug­ging of SPI slave devices with­out hav­ing to develop a C exe­cutable. Addi­tion­ally, it pro­vides a sim­ple way for bash and python scripts to access the SPI mas­ter of the BCM2835 on Rasp­berry Pi. Although the raspian dis­tri­b­u­tion pro­vides GPIO libraries with the included python instal­la­tion it doesn’t include an SPI library. spincl, on the other hand, can be invoked from a python (or bash) script.

Check the orig­i­nal post for a full expla­na­tion of the Rasp­berry Pi SPI command-line util­ity and to down­load the lat­est version.