Hi, I am currently working on a project where I control a robot with an Arduino. My problem is that I want to use another IDE to program the Arduino but with the same usb cable. I was wondering if i could just use SPI on pin 1-0 and the on-board Serial controller will work or if I have to send special command in the SPI pins. The serial of arduino IDE is too slow for my project. Thanks
If you want to use 0,1, the serial pins, you need to be able to interact with the bootloader code.
If you want to use a Programmer and connect to the ICSP header (SPI pin SCK, MISO,MOSI, Reset Power, Gnd), that'd be another method.
My standalone programmer uses that to load code into boards:
http://www.crossroadsfencing.com/BobuinoRev17/
Serial and SPI: You're mixing apples and oranges. They're both fruits but the similarities end there.
To answer your question directly, no, you cannot use SPI over pins 0 and 1. Serial on pins 0,1 is self-clocking and referred to as asynchronous serial comms. Electrically, it is usually RS-232 or RS-485 levels, both of which are intended to exchange a signal over wire from 0-50 feet for 232 and 0-1000 feet for 485.
In the case of the Arduino, the serial in and out of pins 0,1 of the ATMega32 is translated to USB by the second processor on the board, the the ATMega16 (or, in a CH340G USB <-> chip on the clones). The signal is then transmitted over USB and it translated back to asynchronous serial in the PC's operating system and made accessible by an enumerated communications port number, COM0-99.
SPI defined as "serial peripheral interface (SPI) bus is an unbalanced or single-ended serial interface designed for short-distance communication between integrated circuits"
While SPI can be extended, it is not trivial and requires specialized integrated circuits to translate the signals to electrical levels that can be transported over special cabling. USB cannot do that since it too is an asynchronous protocol, incompatible with SPI.
If you have another Arduino you can program that with the Examples/ArduinoISP program and then use that Arduino for uploading programs using the ICSP header.
I have an Atmega 328 on a breadboard with the ArduinoISP program loaded onto it and I use that for programming Attiny chips.
...R