Wi-FIRE and bit-banging SPI?

[jfrenzel]

I've been looking over the SD library that was installed as part of the chipKIT boards (ver 1.4.1) and I get the distinct impression that it implements the SPI protocol to the SD card using bit-banging, rather than a PIC32 SPI peripheral. Is this correct?

Assuming so, are there any Arduino-compatible libraries for the Wi-FIRE that utilized the SPI peripherals?

Assuming not, is my best be to go with MPLAB Harmony? (I'm an old MPLAB-X guy using version 2.10 and an old peripheral library)

[jfrenzel]

I have since discovered that there are two relevant libraries for Arduino included as part of the Digilent Core: DSPI and DSDVOL. I believe the former provides a hardware implementation of SPI using the PIC32 SPI controllers, which is in turn used by the latter to implement access to the SD card via SPI3.

[jpeyron]

Hi @jfrenzel,

Looking at the reference manual for the ChipKit Wi-Fire here under section 9 it says that the SD card is accessed using an SPI interface on PIC32 microcontroller pins dedicated to this purpose. The Arduino IDE SD library uses a “bit-banged” software SPI implementation to talk to SD card. However, software can be written to access the SD card using SPI3. I do not believe there is a Arduino compatible SD libraries that use the SPI peripherals. Unfortunately ,I have not used Harmony so I would not be able to directly speak to its use but Here is some Examples using chipKIT Wi-FIRE and this uses the sd card.

thank you,

Jon

[jpeyron]

Hi @jfrenzel,

I was aware of and used the DSPI library. I was not made aware of the DSDVOL. This library allows you to either use the SPI hardware or "bit bang".  Thank you for pointing this out.

cheers,

Jon