Onion IoT module Python SPI

Some say China is the country of 80-20, things are complete and great to 80% , the remaining 20% of polish is left hanging. The Mediatek CPU used in the Onion IoT modules suffers from a similar shortcoming. There is an working SPI bus, but it is simplex ( OUCH!!) . Simplex means only receive and transmit can take place at a time.

For interfacing the Onion Module with Energy Monitor IC's this is a huge blocker since the typical communication flow with this IC's runs as:

1. Write a 8 or 16 bit register address to the SPI bus
2. Immediately read-back a 16bit value over the SPI bus while the chip-select is held low.

The proposed remedy to this after a bit of debugging and probing with logic analyzers is to directly use the user-space SPI c-library or to fix the python-spidev library with an xfer3 method which does a special write where the clock keeps going, the first bytes are written and next bytes are read.

I have started on the path for fixing the Python library on my fork. OpenWRT build system seems happy with my efforts so far. It remains to be seen if we can communicate with the energy monitor ASIC's. Contributions are much appreciated.