Very recently I just wanted to speak some SPI to some RF IC on a breakout board. I narrowed down the quickest options to this:
* Use my UM232H (FTDI FT232H dev board) to do SPI from my Mac. Dismissed pretty quickly, since I did not feel like dealing with the drivers and FTDI library.
* Boot Linux on one of my FPGA/ARM combos and hope that the generic SPI driver also exposes itself to user space, so that I can just pipe my data on the shell using xxd -r to /dev/spi-foo or whatever. But even if the case, I had to probably at least mess with the device tree to get the I/O pins assigned (and boot Linux, and have the proper tools).
* Use the Arduino Uno that I got as a gift, but never used so far, and either use its SPI library or hope someone made a "Sketch" already that I could just paste.
In the end, the last option won out, because someone actually had made a Sketch already that I could literally just paste and run.
But that was kind of lucky. I feel like such a self-contained Forth computer that is always ready to accept some Forth (instead of having to mess with a C toolchain) could make tasks like this super quick and simple, with flexibility.
Experiences?