Transmitting ASCII 'A' over SPI Protocol

Question

I'm working on a project that involves connecting directly from the TRS jack of an iPhone to a SPI port on a microcontroller.

So the iPhone is the master and the microcontroller is the slave

So let's say the left speaker channel of the iPhone is responsible for generating clock signals

Now how do I transmit for example a single ASCII byte 'A' from the master to the slave?

I can see that each time the clock edge rises ( let's say passes zero ), both master and slave read off a new bit -- whatever the state of the respective MISO/MOSI

But how to byte-align?

Binary for 'A' is 0100 0001

How do we distinguish that leading 0 from the silence that preceded?

It seems to me that a sensible protocol would be to use 0xFF or something as a start Sentinel, and have the next byte dictate the number of bytes ( between 1 and 256 ) in the packet that is to come.

And then these bytes get sent one after the other, may be followed by a parity byte.

Maybe each byte would have parity bit...?

As soon as this ' packet ' has arrived, the decoder could start looking for another start Sentinel.

So that's how I would go about designing SPI. so I'm trying to find some documentation that tells me how it is actually done.

But I'm getting really frustrated bouncing around Google / Wikipedia / IRC

Is there someone out there who understands this protocol, and wouldn't mind giving me a really simple example usage -- sending the single character 'A' via SPI

Answer 1

SPI devices also typically have a chip-select signal (sometimes referred to as a frame sync) that is used to multiplex devices on a single SPI bus. Thus, SPI is often referred to as a 3-wire or 4-wire interface (MISO, MOSI, CS, and CLK; for unidirectional devices, either MISO or MOSI can be omitted). A frame is typically assumed to start at the first bit after the chip-select signal is asserted, but every device has its own protocol. You'll need to adhere to whatever the other side of the link expects.

Answer 2

SPI transmits data on clock edges. Whether it's the rising or falling edge is determined by what's doing the sending and/or receiving. Since that's the case, you should be able to use your clock pulses as your frame.

Most devices will have MISO, MOSI, CLK, and CS. In slave mode you can ground the CS and always have the microcontroller "listen" for any SPI transmission. The iPhone is the master and controls the MOSI and CLK. It shouldn't matter what the iPhone does to with MOSI output when the clock is not running since the slave microcontroller won't read in data. In the end, all that matters is that the MOSI output data is valid on the correct clock edges.

You didn't specify what microcontroller you're using, but Atmel has a good app note about their implementation of SPI in their AVR series. You might consider and interrupt based scheme to poll the SPI data.