WTF is this communication protocal?

[DavidAlfa]

You're the master, so there's no "inmediate answer" unless you cause it:
- Enable SDO
- Enable CS
- Send "I wanna read" command
- Disable SDO
- At this stage you can take a break, have some tea and cookies, the slave is waiting for clocks and won't do anything until then.
- Receive data by sending clocks
- Disable CS
- Done

[Simon]

Not sure what the disconnect is, you've got a mental block... just chill, sleep on it, and it'll probably be a 'duh' moment. *shrug*

Well first one I come across, I was not aware there was supposed to be a bidirectional single data wire SPI, every explanation of SPI I have seen is data in data out. Yes it's doable I was just rather taken aback by the way this works and as others confirm no I can't use even a flexible SPI port to deal with this chip without some creativity mid message, that is not a standard.

But there is 1/10 the stock of these compared to the I2C version so maybe yea, these are are easier than I2C.

[mikerj]

Not sure what the disconnect is, you've got a mental block... just chill, sleep on it, and it'll probably be a 'duh' moment. *shrug*

as others confirm no I can't use even a flexible SPI port to deal with this chip without some creativity mid message,

As others have suggested you can simply join MOSI and MISO together with a resistor at the master end which allows the use of any regular SPI master peripheral.  The resistor allows the slave to drive the data line without contention.  This is a very common scheme that has been used for a long time where full duplex SPI isn't needed.