Can't drive SPI slow enough

I am trying to slot a particle into an SPI connection between my hot tub control panel and its main board. My end goal is to remotely monitor and control my hot tub.

I used me Open Bench Logic sniffer to analyze the signal.

The 3 bytes take 400 microseconds to transmit.

If I use the SPI interface with the setClockDivider set to the max the slowest I can transmit the data is 100 microseconds on the SPI interface or 200 microseconds on the SPI1 interface.

Does any one know how to slow either of these interfaces ?

Is there a bit-blaster SPI implementation that I could run slower ?

thanks

Alex

@skinks, why do you need it so slow and what speed do you want?

I believe the receiving end needs the clock to be running at 60 kHz. I had limited success using SPI1 with the max clock divider e.g 100Hz. When I sent a series of bytes recorded with my Bus Pirate the display lit up and displayed correctly, but I can’t reliably make this work.

@skinks, is the Particle device like a “man in the middle” for the SPI? That seems like a very slow SPI clock but you could do it with software SPI (see below). By adding delayMicroseconds(), you can slow down the software clock to whatever speed you need.

/**
 * Implement software SPI tranfer using bit banging
**/
byte SPIxfer(byte data) {
	byte b=0, bit;

	for (bit = 0; bit < 8; bit++)  {	// walks down mask from bit 7 to bit 0
		digitalWrite(_mosiPin, !!(data & (1 << (7 - bit))));   // set the MOSI pin
		digitalWrite(_clockPin, HIGH);  // Clock the data to the slave
         delayMicroseconds(2);  // adjust this delay to make sure slave is clocking the data
		b |= digitalRead(_misoPin) << (7 - bit);  // read the data back from the slave (if it applies)
		digitalWrite(_clockPin, LOW);  // reset clock to next cycle
        delayMicroseconds(15);  // delay total 17us for approx 60KHz SPI clock 
		}
	return b;
}
2 Likes

Yes man in the middle exactly, do you know of cases where this has been done before ?

I will give this a try.