mjhjmtu

I'm trying to get SPI working on my board.
That's what I came up:

• SPI is not enabled by default in armbian, we need to enable it first
  (enable corresponding DT overlay)


• in linux SPI can only be accessed via /dev/spidev*.* files


• if I don't see any spi devices in my dev folder then SPI is not enabled on my board


• in the latest versions of armbian spi can be enabled in armbain-config (under
  System/Hardware/spi-spidev)


• in previous versions it was needed to decompile /boot/script.bin into fex file,  enable SPI there and compile it back

I did clean install of Armbian Bionic (I also did try Stretch earlier), updated it and enabled spi-spidev,  restarted the board but still got no spidev files. 

Here is my armbianmonitor log.
That's how I check if SPI is enabled:

dima@orangepipcplus:~$ cat /boot/armbianEnv.txt
verbosity=1
logo=disabled
console=both
disp_mode=1920x1080p60
overlay_prefix=sun8i-h3
rootdev=UUID=09e9478d-c7f2-4b16-a2d7-66f5313ff813
rootfstype=ext4
overlays=spi-add-cs1 spi-jedec-nor spi-spidev
usbstoragequirks=0x2537:0x1066:u,0x2537:0x1068:u
dima@orangepipcplus:~$ ls /dev/*spi*
ls: cannot access '/dev/*spi*': No such file or directory

BTW, my goal is to create smart home project with nrf24l01 communication, but I'm stuck on script error that says could not open /dev/spidev0.0 (not exact paste)

So my question is: how to enable spi so that /dev/spidev*.* files will appear?

Okay, this was really stupid. I just needed to read about Device Tree overlays carefully.

I didn't set the required SPI parameter param_spidev_spi_bus. Here is my armbianEnv.txt now:

verbosity=1
logo=disabled
console=both
disp_mode=1920x1080p60
overlay_prefix=sun8i-h3
rootdev=UUID=09e9478d-c7f2-4b16-a2d7-66f5313ff813
rootfstype=ext4
overlays=spi-spidev
param_spidev_spi_bus=0
usbstoragequirks=0x2537:0x1066:u,0x2537:0x1068:u

Note that armbain-config does not set this parameter, so you can't get SPI working using this tool only. So for now it's easier just to edit armbianEnv.txt directly.