January 2014
Intermediate to advanced
474 pages
13h 28m
English
So far, when we’ve been talking serial, we’ve really meant the kind of old-school asynchronous serial protocol that’s based on RS-232, which is how computers used to talk to printers in the 1970s. But there are other serial data transfer modes out there, more or less appropriate in different situations.
In this chapter and the next, we’ll look at two modern serial protocols. This chapter deals with the serial peripheral interface (SPI), which is blindingly fast and better suited for a small number of devices. The other protocol, I2C (“inter integrated circuit”), has an addressing scheme and is easily extended to a network of up to 128 devices using only two wires (and ground), but is a lot slower ...