Raspberry Pi 3 Cookbook for Python Programmers - Third Edition

Getting ready

The wiringPi library that we used previously for I²C also supports SPI. Ensure that wiringPi is installed (see Chapter 10, Sensing and Displaying Real-World Data, for details) so that we can use it here.

Next, we need to enable SPI if we didn't do so when we enabled I²C previously:

sudo nano /boot/config.txt  

Remove the # before #dtparam=spi=on to enable it, so it reads, and save (Ctrl + X, Y, Enter):

dtparam=spi=on  

You can confirm that the SPI is active by listing all the running modules using the following command and locating spi_bcm2835:

lsmod  

You can test the SPI with the following spiTest.py script:

#!/usr/bin/python3 # spiTest.py import wiringpi print("Add SPI Loopback - connect GPIO Pin19 and Pin21") print("[Press ...