If anyone is interested in using stepper motor drivers that require initialization via the SPI bus…
I have created a pull request that allows for any arbitrary stepper driver (or other hardware) on the SPI bus to be initialized/written/read.
I added a configuration item and a console command that uses raw hexdata to initialize/write/read stepper driver data to/from the SPI. Note that this is very powerful for trying out, implementing, tweaking, and debugging new or currently unsupported stepper drivers with Smoothieware, as it can be used to initialize/write/read anything on the SPI bus. However, it requires detailed technical knowledge (and the datasheet) of your particular stepper driver chip and your printer configuration in order to properly initialize the driver’s registers.
I have tested this extensively myself for initializing, tweaking, and debugging five TMC5160 SilentStepSticks from Trinamic to run my large homemade Cartesian 3D printer, and it works very well. (Note, however, that it is not specific in any way to the TMC5160 or any other driver – it is generic.)
Please help me and the community, if you can, by testing this out and providing feedback, so that it might be merged into Smoothieware edge for all.
Refer to here for some description on how to use it.
If you have any questions, post them here and I will try to help, if I can.
All the best!