(SPI equipped) Sensor Data to PC

SPI is not compatible with the normal "RS-232" serial port protocol.

A SPI interface requires three wires: data, clock, and chip select. The ADIS16201 should detail the signals required.

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Peter Bennett VE7CEI 
email: peterbb4 (at) interchange.ubc.ca        

You can try bit bashing SPI with the parallel port or even twiddling the serial port signals such as RTS/CTS/Ring. Only trouble is PCs these days don't have a parallel port and you are lucky if you get a serial ports. And you'd need level shifters and it would be a bit of a hack.

What would be a much better idea is to use the FT2232C with the DLL and Delphi code downloadable from here

Peter

Thanks for your reply. Right now I am working on a solution with the FT2232C. I mentioned that I am not that experienced with programming hardware. I've checked my circuitry more than once. I've checked that the drivers are loaded correctly. The sample code from FTDI's resources site helped me a lot. The sample programmes from ftdi and dlp design work with my circuitry. But the data I get out of the sensor doesn't make sense. I went through all the app notes, programmers guides and I can't figure out whats wrong in my code. Do you have any advice for a hardware newbie?

You need to learn more about SPI. I'm not sure how it's done at high level like you are doing but the way that SPI works is that it swaps a byte at a time. You transmit a byte and simultaneously you get a byte back.

The first thing I'd do is to put a scope on the clock and datalines to see if anything is being exchanged.

Then I'd have a close look at the sensor datasheet

to see what commands are required to read and write to the sensor's registers.

Use SPI_Write and SPI_Read or whatever they are called to send these commands to the sensor and you'll get a response the same size as the number of bytes that you sent out. Most of the commands to this chip are two bytes. You should be able to extract the relevant data from this.

Peter