Find out whether SPI is enabled or not

Question

I have a game that needs SPI. In the installation instructions, I noted that SPI has to be enabled via raspi-config.

Now, I'd like to check in a shell script whether the user has activated SPI or not. How can I query the SPI state?

Answer 1

You can use raspi-config non-interactively to get the SPI status:

sudo raspi-config nonint get_spi

Which returns 0 (enabled) or 1 (disabled)

Similarly, enable with:

sudo raspi-config nonint do_spi 0

Answer 2

SPI does not have to be enabled by raspi-config. It is just a convenient way of doing so on Raspbian.

Try something like the following to check if the kernel SPI device exists.

#!/bin/bash

if [[ -e /dev/spidev0.0 ]]
then echo "SPI exists"
else echo "no SPI"
fi

This isn't fool proof as you don't need to use the kernel driver to use SPI.