On the quest for a cheap and easy way to connect some simple SPI devices to my laptop it was surprising to not find anything suitable available. The idea is neither new nor innovative and surely there must have been something already.

Maybe the use-case was to special. To connect the SPI device to a Linux laptop over USB in order to develop a SPI kernel driver for it and having a rapid development and test cycle. None of the solutions to access the SPI device over libusb in userspace would work for me. I needed a SPI master controller in kernelspace to work with the variety of devices and kernel subsystems.

After some research I settled on the MCP2210 chip. With its cheap and easy to get development boards and an out-of-tree driver as a good start. Maybe it is also something others are looking for and it is surely worth demonstrating and explaining.