What is the difference between mipi dsi and spi?

Question

In terms of working on microcontrollers and microprocessors, I have been said to work with SPI Interface instead of using USB. When I was going to deeper on my hardware selection, I have noticed that there are many other Interface like MIPI Dsi, Csi or so on. So what are differences? Can I choose something with mipi dsi interface and use it on my system which will be a sensor system?

Answer 1

Your question is rather broad for Stack Overflow and has a really wide scope; but fundamentally, all the interfaces you've lists, SPI, USB, MIPI DSI, MIPI CSI, etc, are all just communication interfaces, or ways for external components like sensors, cameras, displays, input devices, storage units, etc to talk to a processor; each usually being designed with specific goals in mind. USB for example was designed to be generic and used to connect peripherals to desktop/laptop consumer systems from keyboads and mice to webcams to other devices; while MIPI DSI was specifically designed to interface mobile/embedded displays to the host processor. Due to these design goals for each interface, they all have quite different physical and link-layer implementations (ie, the actual number of wires and the way the signals on those wires are sent and received).

When looking to which interface is right for your system, you need to look at what the processor supports and what interfaces the device you wish to hook up to it supports. If say, you have a simple accelerometer and a simple microprocessors, its likely both with use either a SPI or I2C interface. If its a larger processor and a camera, then either USB or MIPI CSI might be good options. Also recognize that depending on software support, writing code to interface with a USB sensor can be quite a bit more complex than one for a SPI interface (thus the widespread use of SPI and I2C in embedded systems). Without more details, I cant say whats a good way to hook things up (and that type of question might better fit on electronics stackexchange: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/ ).