Book Image

GNU/Linux Rapid Embedded Programming

By : Rodolfo Giometti
Book Image

GNU/Linux Rapid Embedded Programming

By: Rodolfo Giometti

Overview of this book

Embedded computers have become very complex in the last few years and developers need to easily manage them by focusing on how to solve a problem without wasting time in finding supported peripherals or learning how to manage them. The main challenge with experienced embedded programmers and engineers is really how long it takes to turn an idea into reality, and we show you exactly how to do it. This book shows how to interact with external environments through specific peripherals used in the industry. We will use the latest Linux kernel release 4.4.x and Debian/Ubuntu distributions (with embedded distributions like OpenWrt and Yocto). The book will present popular boards in the industry that are user-friendly to base the rest of the projects on - BeagleBone Black, SAMA5D3 Xplained, Wandboard and system-on-chip manufacturers. Readers will be able to take their first steps in programming the embedded platforms, using C, Bash, and Python/PHP languages in order to get access to the external peripherals. More about using and programming device driver and accessing the peripherals will be covered to lay a strong foundation. The readers will learn how to read/write data from/to the external environment by using both C programs or a scripting language (Bash/PHP/Python) and how to configure a device driver for a specific hardware. After finishing this book, the readers will be able to gain a good knowledge level and understanding of writing, configuring, and managing drivers, controlling and monitoring applications with the help of efficient/quick programming and will be able to apply these skills into real-world projects.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
GNU/Linux Rapid Embedded Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

The raw SPI bus


As for USB and I2C buses the SPI bus supports the raw access in order to directly send and receive messages from the SPI slaves, so it's time to show a little example about how we can do it on our Wandboard.

As for other raw accesses, the only problem is that it interrupts management. In this case, we cannot manage these signals from the user space. A kernel driver must be used.

Exchanging data in C

To show how we can manage the raw SPI bus, we are going to manage a really simple device using the Wandboard, that is, the thermocouple to digital converter based on the MAX31855 chip:

Note

The device can be purchased at:  http://www.cosino.io/product/thermocouple-max31855 or by surfing the Internet. The datasheet of the MAX31855 is available at: https://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/MAX31855.pdf.

Electrical connections are reported in this image:

By looking at the chip's datasheet, we see that its functioning is very simple: it has one 32-bit register where we can read...