Features

Devices

  • All FTDI device ports (UART, MPSSE) can be used simultaneously.

    • SPI and I2C SPI support simultaneous GPIO R/W access for all pins that are not used for SPI/I2C feature.

  • Several FTDI adapters can be accessed simultaneously from the same Python runtime instance.

Supported features

UART

Serial port, up to 6 Mbps. PyFtdi includes a pyserial emulation layer that offers transparent access to the FTDI serial ports through a pyserial- compliant API. The serialext directory contains a minimal serial terminal demonstrating the use of this extension, and a dispatcher automatically selecting the serial backend (pyserial, PyFtdi), based on the serial port name.

See also Limitations.

SPI master

Supported devices:

Mode

CPol

CPha

Status

0

0

0

Supported on all MPSSE devices

1

0

1

Workaround available for on -H series

2

1

0

Supported on -H series (FT232H/FT2232H/FT4232H/FT4232HA)

3

1

1

Workaround available for on -H series

PyFtdi can be used with pyspiflash module that demonstrates how to use the FTDI SPI master with a pure-Python serial flash device driver for several common devices.

Both Half-duplex (write or read) and full-duplex (synchronous write and read) communication modes are supported.

Experimental support for non-byte aligned access, where up to 7 trailing bits can be discarded: no clock pulse is generated for those bits, so that SPI transfer of non byte-sized can be performed.

See Wiring and Limitations.

Note: FTDI*232* devices cannot be used as an SPI slave.

I2C master

Supported devices: FT232H, FT2232H, FT4232H, FT4232HA

For now, only 7-bit addresses are supported.

GPIOs can be used while I2C mode is enabled.

The i2cscan.py script helps to discover which I2C devices are connected to the FTDI I2C bus. See the Tools chapter to locate this tool.

The pyi2cflash module demonstrates how to use the FTDI I2C master to access serial EEPROMS.

See Wiring and Caveats.

Note: FTDI*232* devices cannot be used as an I2C slave.

JTAG

JTAG API is limited to low-level access. It is not intented to be used for any flashing or debugging purpose, but may be used as a base to perform SoC tests and boundary scans.

It requires the PyJtagTools Python module which integrates a JTAG engine, while PyFtdi implements the FTDI JTAG backend.

EEPROM

The pyftdi/bin/ftconf.py script helps to manage the content of the FTDI companion EEPROM.

Status

This project is still in beta development stage. PyFtdi is developed as an open-source solution.