ST has some application notes that talk about emulating a parallel bus using DMA to GPIO. I appreciate that, but it doesn't answer important questions. I am looking through the reference manual, and I can't seem to find clarify the things that I am concerned about.
I am most concerned about the jitter. The reference manual repeatedly states, that when DMA is triggered (e.g., by a timer), the DMA controller will read the memory and transfer the value to the peripheral. That might be fine with peripherals that have their own FIFO. There, when space is available in the FIFO, DMA is triggered and fills the FIFO. That will probably happen before the FIFO runs empty.
But with GPIO, if the DMA channels doesn't have a FIFO itself, the data will not be ready when the timer triggers and it needs to be fetched from SRAM. So between the timer triggering and between the value actually arriving in the GPIO output register, some time may pass. This might be measurable when looking at the clock output by the timer and the GPIO pins. The DMA controller has to compete for access to the SRAM with the running program, so certain activities by the program may increase the jitter.
Maybe that is a colossal oversight on my part, but ST's reference manual doesn't seem mention a FIFO as part of the DMA. If that is the case, that would result in jitter which may impact performance at higher frequencies.
I need to toggle 3 to 4 pins synchronously to a clock from 100kHz to 1MHz. I am considering DMA to GPIO and also abusing a QuadSPI controller. I am currently testing on a STM32L4 but I'm also considering STM32F4 or even F1.
DMA to/from GPIOit is just memory-to-memory transfer. Many STM32 uCs have built in DMA FIFOs - but they will have not use here.
The core has always priority over the DMA so if it can be the issue (very unlikely) place the core accesible data (this data which uC will access when DMA is active in the separate memory area - for example CCM (if your uC has one)
Answering the question
memory to/FROM GPIO is very reliable - I personally did not have any problems with it.
If your clock can be anything between 100 kHz and 1 MHz, I guess you're not worried about jitter in the clock itself, only jitter in the data versus the clock. If your clock need not be continuous, a novel idea then is to do some preprocessing of the data to include the clock signal as part of the GPIO data. Then you could trigger the DMA at regular intervals using a timer, and you'll get the data frequency on the bus at half that rate with perfect alignment between clock and data.
So if you you want to send the four-bit data 5 6 B D with data valid on the positive clock edge, prepare the DMA buffer as so: 05 15 06 16 0B 1B 0D 1D and connect the GPIO pin 4 as the clock. Leave a final byte in the buffer to reset the clock/bus to idle state, if you need.
You can of course extend the idea and incorporate control signals such as chip selects and tri-state signals for external buffers, if needed.
Also take note that not all DMA blocks may have access to the AHB bus which is holding the GPIO registers. For example on STM32F40x, only DMA2 can be used (this is what got me, until I read this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/46619315/6552613).
I haven't fully explored this space yet, but, by disabling interrupts and polling for interrupt flags in my main loop, it's made the jitter on my GPIO DMA basically disappear! Granted it might just be the set of interrupts have enabled, but everything down to the systick timer was killing me. By polling the interrupts in the main loop it seems to have fixed my issue.
Note that this is on an STM32F042, and I never exceed 6 MHz for my period. When I try to, i.e. try to go to 8 MHz sampling out, everything falls apart. YMMV
Related
I'm using an STM32H743. I have an external clock signal coming in on a GPIO pin, and I want to very accurately measure elapsed time between each rising (or falling) edge in the external clock signal. So I set things up so that TIM4 is triggered by the external clock, and TIM5 is triggered by the internal oscillator.
I wrote an IRQ so that whenever TIM4 triggers, an interrupt runs that captures TIM5's value. It seems to work OK, but I'm wondering if I can do it through DMA to avoid all the context switching and free up the CPU. Basically I want to set up a DMA so that each TIM4 event initiates a DMA transfer that copies the TIM5 counter value to a circular buffer somewhere.
I've searched through forums and the DMA documentation but I'm hazy on whether a timer register can be a valid DMA source. I was thinking maybe I could do something like this:
hDma->PAR = (uint32_t) &htim5.Instance->CNT;
hDma->M0AR = (uint32_t) myBufferPtr;
hDma->NDTR = myBufferSize;
hDma->CR |= (uint32_t)DMA_SxCR_EN;
But I'm not sure if this can work.
Short version: Can I use the timer's CNT register as a DMA transfer source? Would it be a peripheral-to-memory transfer? Or a memory-to-memory transfer? Are there other flags I need to make this work? Or is it not possible? Or is there another STM32 feature that would make it easier to count time between pulses?
Disclaimer
I must confess that my long practical experience with STM32 by now stayed with mainstream controller families like STM32F0, STM32F3, STM32F4 and STM32L4.
Therefore I'm answering based on what those controllers would offer you in your situation.
The STM32H7 series is much stronger, let alone it offers several additional DMA technologies like DMA2D, MDMA and lots of other stuff that I'm not sure about.
But I think a simplified answer might also help you for now, so I'm daring to write it.
Can I use the timer's CNT register as a DMA transfer source? Would it be a peripheral-to-memory transfer? Or a memory-to-memory transfer? Are there other flags I need to make this work? Or is it not possible?
I would expect this to work.
I don't see a reason not to read the TIMx_CNT register in a DMA transfer.
The CNT register is definitely a peripheral address so you have to configure it as a peripheral-to-memory transfer.
I believe that the peripheral/memory separation refers to the bus from which the DMA controller fetches the data (or to which bus one it delivers them) in the bus matrix implemented in every STM32.
Or is there another STM32 feature that would make it easier to count time between pulses?
Yes, there is:
Many of the TIM peripherals (not all are the same) offer you a feature called "Input Capture" that connects the channel (sub-)peripheral of the TIM instance to the input and has the main part of the (same!) TIM peripheral do the internal clocking.
A prerequisite of this is, that the pin you'd like to measure has a TIMx_CHy alternate function, not "only" a TIMx_ETR one.
The TIM peripherals offer a wealthy range of different configuration options - and a complicated mess as long as you haven't got used to it.
As an introduction and a good overview, I recommend two application notes from ST:
AN4013 Application note. "STM32 cross-series timer overview", Rev.8
Which timers you have on your µC, and which features are offered by which one.
AN4776 Application note. "General-purpose timer cookbook for STM32 microcontrollers", Rev.3
How to use the timers you have. Check out section 2.6, input capture is on page 27.
Looking up those two, I found a third one you might want to check out for better precision, related to HRTIM timers:
AN4539 Application note. "HRTIM cookbook", Rev.4
It is easily done using STM32CubeIDE configurator:
configure timer, enable input capture channel, enable DMA (mode
circular, peripheral to memory,data width word/word). Enable
interrupts.
Prepare buffer for storing captured counter values
Start IC in DMA mode before main loop
For high speed operation you may copy data from timerCaptureBuffer
to timerCaptureBufferSafe inside these callbacks. For example, DMA memory to memory transfer to minimize time spent in HAL_TIM_IC_CaptureHalfCpltCallback and HAL_TIM_IC_CaptureCallback interrupts. Process adjacent captured values stored in timerCaptureBufferSafe after DMA memory to memory callback signals data is ready. You may use signaling flags so timerCaptureBufferSafe will not be overwritten.
Here is an example:
#define TIM_BUFFER_SIZE 128
uint32_t timerCaptureBuffer[TIM_BUFFER_SIZE];
uint32_t timerCaptureBufferSafe[TIM_BUFFER_SIZE];
// ...
HAL_DMA_RegisterCallback(&hdma_memtomem_dma2_stream2,
HAL_DMA_XFER_CPLT_CB_ID,
myDMA_Callback22);
// ...
HAL_TIM_IC_Start_DMA(&htim2, TIM_CHANNEL_1, uint32_t*)timerCaptureBuffer,TIM_BUFFER_SIZE);
// ...
void HAL_TIM_IC_CaptureHalfCpltCallback(TIM_HandleTypeDef *htim)
{
HAL_DMA_Start_IT(&hdma_memtomem_dma2_stream2,
(uint32_t)&timerCaptureBuffer[0],
(uint32_t)&timerCaptureBufferSafe[0],
sizeof(timerCaptureBuffer)/2/4);
// ...
}
void HAL_TIM_IC_CaptureCallback(TIM_HandleTypeDef *htim)
{
HAL_DMA_Start_IT(&hdma_memtomem_dma2_stream2,
(uint32_t)&timerCaptureBuffer[TIM_BUFFER_SIZE/2],
(uint32_t)&timerCaptureBufferSafe[TIM_BUFFER_SIZE/2],
sizeof(timerCaptureBuffer)/2/4);
// ...
}
void myDMA_Callback22(DMA_HandleTypeDef *_hdma)
{
//...
}
I read that the driver for "Software PWM" is running somehow on the PWM-HW and acessing all GPIOs without using the CPU. Can someone explain how that works? Is there a second processor in the Raspberry Pi used for PWM and PCM module(is there a diagram for the blocks)?
The question is related to this excellent driver which I used a lot in my robots.
Here is the explanation, which I unfortunately don't understand...
The driver works by setting up a linked list of DMA control blocks with the
last one linked back to the first, so once initialised the DMA controller
cycles round continuously and the driver does not need to get involved except
when a pulse width needs to be changed. For a given period there are two DMA
control blocks; the first transfers a single word to the GPIO 'clear output'
register, while the second transfers some number of words to the PWM FIFO to
generate the required pulse width time. In addition, interspersed with these
control blocks is one for each configured servo which is used to set an output.
While the driver does use the PWM peripheral, it only uses it to pace the DMA
transfers, so as to generate accurate delays."
Is the following understanding right:
The DMA controller is like a second processor. You can run code on it. So it is used here to control all the Raspberry GPIO pins high/low states together with the PWM block. DMA Controller does this continously. There are probably more than one DMA controller in the Raspberry, so the speed of the OS Linux is not influenced much due to one missing DMA controller.
I don't understand how exactly DMA and PWM work together.
I recommend reading RPIO source code together with ServoBlaster's, as it's slightly simplified and can help understanding. Also very important: Broadcom's BCM2835 manual which contains all the tiny details.
is there a diagram for the blocks
The manual contains all the functionalities offered by the chip (not in a block diagram though, as far as I’ve seen).
Is the following understanding right:
The DMA controller is part of the main chip (Broadcom, although I think the same happens on desktop CPUs). It can't exactly run code, but it can copy memory across peripherals by itself, without consuming the main processor’s time. The DMA controller has different channels which can copy memory independently and runs independently of the CPU.
It is configurable via "control blocks" (BCM manual page 40, 4.2.1.1): you can tell the DMA controller to first copy memory from A to B, then from C to D and so on.
don't understand how exactly DMA and PWM work together
DMA is used to send data to the PWM controller ("Pulse Width Modulator", BCM manual page 138, chap. 9), which consumes the data and this creates a very precise delay. Interestingly, the PWM controller is... not used to generate any PWM pulse, but just to wait.
Can someone explain how that works?
Ultimately, you configure the value of the GPIO pins (or the settings of the PWM or PCM generator), by setting memory at a special address; the memory in that region represents the peripheral configuration (BCM manual page 89, chapter 6).
So the idea is: copy 1 onto the memory that controls the GPIO pin value, using the DMA controller; wait the pulse width; copy 0 onto the GPIO pin value; wait the remaining part of the period; loop. Since the DMA controller does it, it doesn't consume CPU cycles.
The key point here is being able to make the DMA controller "wait" an exact amount of time, and for this, RPIO and ServoBlaster use the PWM controller in FIFO mode (the PCM generator also has such functionality, but let's stick to PWM). This means that the PWM controller will "send" the data it reads from its so-called FIFO queue, and then stop. It doesn't matter how it's "sent" (BCM manual page 139, 9.4 MSENi=0), the key point is that it requires a fixed amount of time. As a matter of fact, it doesn't even matter which data is sent: the DMA controller is configured to write into the FIFO queue and then wait until the PWM controller has finished sending data, and this creates a very precise delay.
The resolution of the resulting pulse is given by the duration of the PWM transfer, which depends on the frequency at which the PWM controller is running.
Example
We have a maximum resolution of 1ms (given by the PWM delay), and we want to have a pulse of 25% duty cycle with frequency 125Hz. The period of a pulse is thus 8ms. The DMA operation performed will be
Set pin to 1 (DMA write to GPIO mem)
Wait 1ms (DMA write to PWM FIFO)
Wait 1ms (DMA write to PWM FIFO)
Set the pin to 0 (DMA write to GPIO mem)
Wait 1ms (DMA write to PWM FIFO)
...repeat "Wait 1ms" 4 more times.
Wait 1ms (DMA write to PWM FIFO) and jump back to 1.
This will thus require at least 10 DMA control blocks (8 wait instructions, given by period / delay plus 2 write operations).
Note: in ServoBlaster and RPIO, it will consume exactly 16 DMA control blocks, because (for higher precision), they always perform a "memory copy" operation before a "wait operation". The "memory copy" operation is just a dummy unless it needs to change the pin value.
This is my first post at this forum.
I am developing a MIDI sequencer device based on a STM32F429DISCOVERY board running at stock 180MHz. In order to send midi messages the USART1 is configured for 31250 bauds and the appropriate DMA is configured to transfer a 3 byte array stored in ram to the USART. I was doing tests of even timing of sending of midi messages, by configuring the Timer 4 update interrupt, within the service routine of which I am enabling the memory-to-peripheralUSART1 DMA operation. This gives me a periodic sending of a 3 byte message over the USART1 peripheral.
Everything works great and with correct frequency and correct data, but i have a small issue which i have been researching for few days now and have not been able to correct. To make things clearer, within the timer interrupt routine I set a led on the discovery (RG13) to momentarily blink and connected 1 channel of an oscilloscope to the led pin. The second channel of the oscilloscope is connected to the USART TX pin. Now, when the code is executed, i can see the led pulse on the oscilloscope's CH1, followed by the USART serial data on the CH2. But for some reason the time between the led pulse and the beginning of the serial data transfer fluctuates with every sending of the data. It increments with every sending, going from around 1uS to around 30uS, and then jumps back to 1.
I noticed that if i slightly change the USART baudrate, the time fluctuation between the pulse and the data sending changes in pattern, going faster or slower and with longer or shorter range.
I have tried resetting all the apropriate flags from USART as well as DMA, have tried to disable/enable the timer, played with interrupt priorities, but nothing has worked to get rid of the time fluctuation.
As you can imagine, the stability of this is crucial for a MIDI sequencer hardware application as it bases the timing of the musical events, which must be rock solid.
I have also tried using the USART by itself without DMA, manually sending every byte, basically same results. Interrupt driven USART TX exhibited likewise results.
The only thing which seemed to work to get rid of the time fluctuation of USART TX response is, before every sending operation to deinitialize USART and the DMA modules and reinitialize them again. This seemed to give a stable operation but inserts a long delay between the timer interrupt and the actual sending of the data over the USART, which is unacceptable.
If anyone has any thoughts on this or have done anything similar, I need an advice on where to look at.
Thanks a lot in advance!
Best regards,
Konstantin
Even based on your detailed description, there are various possibilities for errors, so best I can do is guess:
Maybe just one of the TIM setting is just slightly wrong: What about the timer's auto-reload register (TIM4_ARR)?
The period setting must be just one unit lower than the desired transmission period divided by the (possibly prescaled) clock period (see details upcounting/downcounting spec).
Now, if the reload value were just equal to the value instead, the second trigger would be late by one tiny period, the third trigger twice as much and so on (which may look like what you described).
This "ramp of delays" would then rise until the unwanted delay sums up to one UART bit period (which happens to be 32uS for 31250 bauds, quite near to the "around 30uS" you described). The next trigger would then just fit for the neighbouring UART bit cycle (without much delay).
Comparing this hypothesis with your other findings...
Changing the UART baud rate would preserve the fundamental error, but the duration of the irritating delay changes. It can appear to change its sign ("faster or slower"), depending on the beat characteristics between the (actual) TIM period and the UART bit period. => OK
Changing the event processing from DMA to IRQ handler wouldn't change much about the problem but only the "phase" of the initial delay (by the time the CPU needs to execute a different ST library function). => OK
Disabling and re-enabling the UART might have changed the behaviour because the UART clock might re-synchronize newly with the underlying bus clock (APB2 for USART2), so the delay after the TIM trigger would appear constant, and you wouldn't notice fluctuations. => OK
I am trying to write a small driver program on a Beaglebone Black that needs to send a signal with timings like this:
I need to send 360 bits of information. I'm wondering if I can turn off all interrupts on the board for a duration of 500µs while I send the signal. I have no idea if I can just turn off all the interrupts like that. Searches have been unkind to me so far. Any ideas how I might achieve this? I do have some prototypes in assembly language for the signal, but I'm pretty sure its being broken by interrupts.
So for example, I'm hoping I could have something like this:
disable_irq();
/* asm code to send my bytes */
reenable_irq();
What would the bodies of disable_irq() and reenable_irq() look like?
The calls you would want to use are local_irq_disable() and local_irq_enable() to disable & enable IRQs locally on the current CPU. This also has the effect of disabling all preemption on the CPU.
Now lets talk about your general approach. If I understand you correctly, you'd like to bit bang your protocol over a GPIO with timing accurate to < 1/3 us.
This will be a challenge. Tests show that the Beaglebone black GPIO toggle frequency is going to max out at ~2.78MHz writing directly to the SoC IO registers in kernel mode (~0.18 us minimum pulse width).
So, although this might be achievable by the thinnest of margins by writing atomic code in kernel space, I propose another concept:
Implement your custom serial protocol on the SPI bus.
Why?
The SPI bus can be clocked up to 48MHz on the Beaglebone Black, its buffered and can be used with the DMA engine. Therefore, you don't have to worry about disabling interrupts and monopolizing your CPU for this one interface. With a timing resolution of ~0.021us (# 48MHz), you should be able to achieve your timing needs with an acceptable margin of error.
With the bus configured for Single Channel Continuous Transfer Transmit-Only Master mode and 30-bit word length (2 30-bit words for each bit of your protocol):
To write a '0' with your protocol, you'd write the 2 word sequence - 17 '1's followed by 43 '0's - on SPI (#48MHz).
To write a '1' with your protocol, you'd write the 2 word sequence - 43 '1's followed by 17 '0's - on SPI (#48MHz).
From your signal timmings it's easy to figure out that SPI or other serial peripheral can not reach your demand. In your timmings, encoding is based on the width of the pulse. So let's get to the point:
Q1 Could you turn off all interrupts for a duration of 500µs?
A: 0.5ms is quite a long time in embedded system. ISR is born to enable the concurrency of multi-task and improve the real-time capability. Your should keep in mind that ISR and context-switch(in some chip architecture) are all influenced by global interrupt.
But if your top priority is to perform the timmings, and the real-time window of other tasks are acceptable, of cause you can disable the global interrupt in the duration. Even longer. If not, don't do ATOM operation in such a long time.
Q2 How?
A: For a certain chip, there's asm instruction for open/close global interrupt undoubtedly. Find the instructions or the APIs provided by your OS, do the 3 steps below(pseudocode):
state_t tState = get_interrupt_status( );
disable_interrupt( );
... /*your operation here*/
resume_interrupt( tState );
I want to transfer 8 bit parallel data from IO to memory ,the data is coming very fast at speed of roughly 5 Mhz ,I am using embedded linux on ARM9 based kit by friendly arm which is using S3C2440(400Mhz) processor can any body pleas tell me where to start,my data is a video signal that is coming from a adc
I have read the on internet that I can do this using DMA but I need a start ...
Forget about DMA on this device. The ADC is not available as a DMA source. One reason for this is that DMA is only useful for transferring multiple bytes/words/whatever - the overhead of setting up, starting the DMA and handling an OnCompletion interrupt makes it pointless for occasional transfers of one item. Your ADC has no buffering, just the one output register with 10 sig. bits.
Use an FIQ handler to extract the ADC result. How you buffer the output and signal it for further processing is up to you and the linux driver framework.
have a look at these articles to for brieif theroy
http://my.opera.com/richasn/blog/2011/01/15/application-of-dma-way-in-data-acquisition-in-arm-system
http://my.opera.com/richasn/blog/2011/01/14/application-of-dma-way-in-data-acquisition-in-arm-system