Matrix Orbital GTT43A: PSoC 4 Interface

Summary

In the last several articles I have written about how to use and talk to the Matrix Orbital GTT43A.  Now it is time to write some code.  The PSoC4 program that I am going to show you has evolved over time as I added stuff to it.  For instance, while I was working on this program I ran into a problem where the I2C Bus would hang (the subject of the next article).  As such, some of the code that is in this program was written to help me debug that problem.  With that said, I wanted a program that:

  1. Is command line driven i.e. I can interact with my program via serial commands through the PC COM Port
  2. Can read 1 byte at a time (like I do on the bridge control panel)
  3. Can test the “read whole packet” code
  4. Can selectively send commands via a I2C or the UART
  5. Send test commands to the display e.g. reset, clear
  6. Test the display generated messages (like button presses)

All of this code was built to run on the CY8CKIT-044 which has a PSoC 4200M MCU

Schematic & Pin Assignment

All PSoC 4 projects start with a schematic.  In my schematic I have a UART setup to talk to the KitProg (called UART) and serve as the command processor, an I2C which directly attaches to the I2C bus that drives the display, and a UART that is also attached to the display which I called SCRUART.

The I2CFAIL pin in the schematic I used to help me debug the I2C problem (the subject of the next article)

PSoC 4200m Schematic

The pin assignment has the UART attached to the KitProg UART, the I2C attached to KitProg and the Display.  The SCRUART is attached to UART on the Display.

PSoC 4200M Pin Assignment

 

Main Event Loop

The main event loop has the following parts

  1. Read a character from the keyboard
  2. Process the keyboard command character
  3. Read data from the screen
    1. If you are in packet mode read a whole packet
    2. If you are in streaming mode read one byte

There are three system modes.

  1. IDLE = Dont read from the screen
  2. PACKET = Read whole packets (poll for complete packets)
  3. STREAMING = read bytes (polling)

I also have setup the program to read/write bytes to the UART and I2C.  This is called the “comInterface”.

The enumerated type systemMode is used to setup the polling mode (each time through the main loop, what does it do?).

The actual main section of the code

  1. Starts by initializing the UART, SCRUART and I2C.
  2. On line 299 it reads a character, then switches on the character to figure out which command the user has type.

You can see that ‘u’ and ‘U’ change the communication interface from UART to I2C and back.

The end of the loop handles the “?” case… in other words print out all of the commands.  Then based on the system mode, it either reads a whole message packet from the display or it reads only byte.

I created three keys (0,1,2) to change the system mode, from IDLE, to reading whole packets to reading bytes.

While I was trying to figure out how things worked I wanted to be able to do one thing at a time. So I create ‘r’ to read one byte (like Bridge Control Panel) and ‘p’ to read a whole packet.  Notice that you really really only want to do this why you are not polling the display.

The last section of commands send various GTT2.0 commands to the display.  Notice that the writePacket function knows which system interface to use (either I2C or UART).

First, I declare some commands, just an array of bytes.

Then I use them:

Read Byte

In order to read one byte from the display I first determine which mode Im in, then call the appropriate sub-function.

The first sub function to read bytes via I2C.  To read a byte with no error checking you have to

  1. Send a Start
  2. Send the address
  3. Send the Read bit
  4. Clock it 8 times (this is exactly what the I2CMasterReadByte function does)
  5. Send an NAK
  6. Send a Stop

I ran into an I2C issue which I will talk about in the next article, however, if I see an error from any of these commands Ill put the system into MODE_IDLE and throw an error.  In addition I write a 1 to the I2CFAIL pin, which I am using to trigger the Oscilliscope (so I can see what is happening)

Read Packet

For the packet read code I did the same thing as the byte read code.  Specifically I wrote an overall get packet, then called the correct read packet based on the

If you read the source code that Matrix Orbital gives you for drivers, you will find that it reads one byte at a time.  The problem with doing this is that you

  1. Send a start
  2. Send an I2C address
  3. Send a read bit
  4. Read the ACK
  5. Read a byte
  6. Send a NAK
  7. Send a stop

The problem with this approach is that it uses 11 bit-times extra per byte of overhead (steps 1-4) which kinda sucks.  So I wanted to write a complete packet reader.  My packet reader will

  1. Send a start
  2. Send an I2C address
  3. Send a read bit
  4. Read the ACK
  5. Read a byte  [This is the 254 that marks the start of the packet]
  6. ACK
  7. Read a byte [This is the command which identifies the packet]
  8. ACK
  9. Read a byte [The MSB of the Length]
  10. ACK
  11. Read a byte [The LSB of the Length]
  12. NAK
  13. If there is a length then:
  14. Send the start
  15. Send an I2C address
  16. Send a read bit
  17. Read the ACK
  18. read length -1 bytes
  19. ACK
  20. Read the last byte
  21. Send a NAK
  22. Send a stop

By spec you are supposed to NAK your last read byte to indicate that your read transaction is over… that means you have to NAK the last Length byte because there could be 0 bytes to read, in which case you would need to stop.  It would have been nice if the protocol let you send only one start, but Im pretty sure it was designed for UART, which doesn’t suffer from this problem.  Also as a side note, Im pretty sure that the MCU they are using doesn’t really care, but Im not willing to implement it incorrectly.

Here is the code:

You can "git" these projects from

https://github.com/iotexpert/GTT43A

And the driver library from 

https://github.com/iotexpert/GTT-Client-Library

Title
Matrix Orbital GTT43: A Cool Display
Matrix Orbital GTT43A: Serial Interface
Matrix Orbital GTT43A: GTT Scripts
Matrix Orbital GTT43A: A PSoC 4 Interface
Matrix Orbital GTT43A: Debugging the I2C
Matrix Orbital GTT43A: GTT Driver Library - Part 1
Matrix Orbital GTT43A: GTT Driver Library - Part 1
Matrix Orbital GTT43A: PSoC 6 using RTOS and the GTT Driver Library

The Lost Art of Assembly Language Programming

Cypress introduced it’s first mass market microcontroller in 2001. It used a Cypress designed 8 bit CISC processor running at 24 MHz, with as little as 4 KB Flash and 256 bytes RAM. Wrapped around that was a neat array of programmable analog and digital blocks. This may not sound like much, but with a creative mindset you could get these parts to do amazing things. For instance, I once implemented a complete ultrasonic ranging sensor with full wave analog demodulation in a single PSOC1 as shown below.

PSOC1 Ultrasonic Ranging

With CPU resources at a premium, you had to write tight, efficient code to get the most out of PSOC1. A single C library could consume the entire Flash. Consequently, I wrote a lot of assembly code. That’s not so bad, since I actually enjoy it more than C. There’s a certain elegance to well written, fully commented machine code. In the case of PSOC1, here’s what you had to work with: 5 registers, some RAM and Flash. That’s it. Real Men Write In Assembly.

M8C Architecture

 

We’ll start with simple machine code instruction to make the CPU do something. You can reference the M8C assembly language user guide here for more details. To get the M8C to execute 2+3=5 we write:

mov A,2       ;Load A with 2
add A,3       ;Add 3 to A. Result=5 is in A

We can get fancy by using variables. Let’s add R=P+Q. Assume P is at RAM location 0x20 and Q is at location 0x21, and R is at 0x22

;Initialize variables
mov [0x20],2  ;Load P with 2
mov [0x21],3  ;Load Q with 3

;Add variables
mov X,[0x20]  ;X <- P
mov A,[0x21]  ;A <- Q
adc [X],A     ;X <- P + Q
mov [0x22],X  ;R <- X

The fun thing about assembly is you can always dream up cool ways of doing things in less operations based on the machine’s instruction set. For example, we can simplify the above code as follows:

;Add variables
mov [0x20],[0x22]   ;R <- P
adc [0x22],[0x21]   ;R <- P + Q

In my experience, a good programmer with expert knowledge of the instruction set and CPU resources can always write better code than a compiler. There’s a certain human creativity that algorithms can’t match.

All that being said, I had not seen a good “machine code 101” tutorial for writing assembly in PSOC Creator on modern ARM M0 processors. So let’s walk through one now. We’ll use a CY8CKIT-145 and blink the LED. It’s just what happens to be laying around on the lab bench. Any PSOC4 kit will do.

CY8CKIT-145-40XX

We’ll start by creating a standard project in PSOC Creator, drop a Digital Output pin on the schematic and call it “LED”

Then open the .CYDWR file and drag pin LED to P2[5], since that’s where it is on the LED board. Yours may be in a different place on whatever board you are using.

Now under “Source Files” in the workspace directory you will delete main.c and replace with main.s

Now right clock on “Source Files”, select “Add New File” and select “GNU ARM Assembly File” in the dialog. Rename the file from GNUArmAssembly01.s to main.s

Your workspace ends up looking like this:

So far, so good. Now open main.s, delete everything if it’s not empty and add the following code. This sets up the IDE for M0 assembly architecture

// ==============================================
// ARM M0 Assembly Tutorial
//
// 01 – Blink LED
// ==============================================
.syntax unified
.text
.thumb

Next we need to include register definitions for the chip we are using. These are all from the PSOC4 Technical Reference Manual (TRM)

// ==============================================
// Includes
// ==============================================
.include “cydevicegnu_trm.inc”

Then we are going to do some .equ statements, same as #define in C. This identifies the Port 2 GPIO data register plus bits for the LED pin in on and off state

// ==============================================
// Defines
// ==============================================
.equ LED_DR,CYREG_GPIO_PRT2_DR          // LED data reg address
.equ LED_PIN,5                          // P2.5
.equ LED_OFF,1<<led_pin                 // 0010 0000
.equ LED_ON,~LED_OFF                    // 1101 1111

Now you add the right syntax to set up main()

// ==============================================
// main
// ==============================================
.global main
.func main, main
.type main, %function
.thumb_func

Finally we add the code for main, which is pretty simple:

main:
ldr r5,=LED_DR      // Load GPIO port addr to r5

loop0:
ldr r6,=LED_ON      // Move led data to r6
str r6,[r5]         // Write r6 data to r5 addr

ldr r0,=0xFFFFFF    // Argument passed in r0
bl CyDelayCycles    // Delay for N cycles

ldr r6,=LED_OFF     // Move led data to r6
str r6,[r5]         // Write r6 data to r5 addr

ldr r0,=0xFFFFFF    // Argument passed in r0
bl CyDelayCycles    // Delay for N cycles

b loop0             // Branch loop0

.endfunc            // End of main
.end                // End of code

One thing to note: The function CyDelayCycles is defined CyBootAsmGnu.s. Any function in assembly gets its arguments passed by the first 4 registers r0,r1,r2 and r3. Before calling the function you simply load r0 with the argument then do a bl (branch with link). This is also why I avoided the first 4 registers when messing with LED data. If you’re interested in doing more with ARM assembly, definitely read the Cortex M0+ Technical Reference Manual. It’s a great primer for the M0+ instruction set.

That’s it. End result is a blinking LED. Cool thing is you can use PSOC Creator with all it’s nice features, but sill access the power of machine code.

You can get the project ZIP file here.

Regards
Darrin Vallis

PSoC 4200M WDT Long Deep Sleep

Summary

Earlier this year I wrote an article about using the PSoC 4200M WDT Watch Dog Timers.  In it I described a bunch of things that you could do with the PSoC 4200M WDT to help you time events, reset the part etc.  Recently a user named JAGIR asked if I could generate interrupts slower than 2 seconds and have the PSoC 4200M in deep sleep.  The answer to both of those questions is yes.

In order to make this work you need to “cascade” two WDTs together, something you can only do with firmware.  I have updated my previous workspace with a new project called “LongDeepSleep” which you can “Git” on my GitHub website or you can “git@github.com:iotexpert/PSoC4-WDTExamples.git”

Configure the PSoC 4200M WDT Design

First add a digital output pin called “RED” to the schematic

PSoC 4200M WDT Schematic

Then assign it to P0[6]

PSoC 4200M WDT - DWR Pin Assignment

Go to the clocks tab of the design wide resources.  Then click on “Edit Clock”.

PSoC 4200M WDT Clocks

On the Low Frequency Clocks configuration page of the design wide resources turn on the two WDTs and setup the dividers.

PSoC 4200M WDT

System Reference Guide – PSoC 4200M WDT

All of the documentation for the PSoC 4200M WDT is in the “Low Frequency Clock aka cy_lfclk” of the system resources documentations.

PSoC 4200M WDT System Reference Guide

When you read a little bit down in the PSoC 4 Low Frequency clock documentation you will find “Note The EDT cascade options are not configurable using these panels but the APIs can be used to perform cascading of WDTs”

PSoC 4200M WDT

Then you search a little bit further down in the document and you will find the API CySysWDTSetCascade which will allow you to hook multiple 16-bit counters together to get 32 or more bits.

PSoC 4200M WDT - CySysWdtSetCascade

Write the PSoC 4200M WDT Firmware

The first example will blink the LED every 4 seconds.  Remember from the configuration above it has a 32KHz input clock with a divider of 1024 on WDT0 and a divider of 128 on WDT1.  That means you will get 32KHz / (1024 *128) = 0.25 Hz aka every 4 seconds.

You can also get different delays by changing the dividers using firmware.  In the example below it is 1Hz output.

 

Serial Wire View with PSOC4

I use PSOC4 to invent all kinds of unique solutions for customers. Usually, they want them field upgradeable to deploy new features or fix bugs. Fortunately Cypress has a great I2C boot loader to meet this need, so I use the heck out of it.

Cypress has a great debugger built into PSOC Creator which fully supports all the ARM Serial Wire Debug protocols such as breakpoints, single step, memory, register viewing etc. However, when you are running a boot loader the debugger does not work! Why not? Because with a boot loader there are two applications resident in PSOC4: The boot loader and application. This is not supported by Cypress implementation of SWD.

Where does this leave you, the intrepid code developer, when debugging a boot loader project? Personally, I have used all kinds of methods: debug UART interface, debug I2C interface, bang out states on pins, debug Bluetooth interface … and on and on. You get the idea. All these methods burn a communications interface and require extra pins on the chip. Sometimes that’s not possible.

The issue recently came to a head when a customer very nearly in production experienced a boot loader failure. One system out of a few thousand was “bricked” when they tried to field  update in the lab. Their pinout is frozen, they can’t add new hardware so how do we look inside PSOC4 and see what’s going on?

I woke up at 2 AM and thought “Ah Ha! SWV!” (Yes, I Am A Geek) Serial Wire View is an ARM native debug protocol that let’s you XRAY the insides of any ARM MCU with the right interface. SWV is a protocol which runs on the SWD pins (clock and data) but also needs the Serial Wire Output (SWO) pin. Cypress left the SWO pin and associated IP off of PSOC4 to save die cost, foiling my great idea. Brief interlude to drink and bang head on desk.

Fortunately, I don’t give up easily. At least my subconscious does not. Woke up the next night thinking “Ah Ha!” again. Wife was mildly annoyed, but tolerates my idiosyncrasies.

Cypress has a nice software UART transmitter implementation. I shamelessly stole it, modified for my purposes and created a custom component. (It’s pretty easy to do this by the way) Baud rate was modified to 230 KBps and the output pin forced to a specific pin with a control file.

Once the component is in place, you can use its _DView_Printf( ) API call to display any debug data. Here is an example:

More about that output pin. Cypress sells a tool for programming and debugging PSOC called CY8CKIT-002, aka MiniProg3. The programming connector consists of VDD, GND, reset, SWD clock and SWD data as shown below.

Since we can’t use SWD protocol for debugging anyway, we can change the pins from SWD to normal GPIO. The pins still function for programming. By default they are in SWD mode as shown.

Going to the system tab of the .CYDWR file, we can change them to GPIO.

Once we do that, the pins look like this. Here’s the trick. We now assign the TX output of our DTView component to pin 3[2], which is available  on the SWD programming header, pin 5.

Can you see where we are going with this? Printf( ) data is now coming out of PSOC4 on pin 3[2], easily accessible on our debug header. This is where MiniProg3 comes in. It can actually receive data as a 230 KBps RX UART on its XRES pin. Weird, right? By building a simple interface cable we can get the data from your debug header into MiniProg3.

MiniProg3 XRES —— SWD HEADER pin 5

MiniProg3   GND —— SWD HEADER pin 2

However, MiniProg3 does not show up as a COM port on your PC, so how do we the data? It needs to be accessed by a host application running the PP_COM API. This is documented under PSOC Programmer Component Object Model COM Interface Guide, Cypress specification 001-45209. If you installed PSOC Creator or Programmer, this document is actually on your PC under C:\Program Files (x86)\Cypress\Programmer\Documents. Engineers don’t like to read instructions. Amazing what you can find when you do.

I wrote a simple  console application which opens MiniProg3 using PP_COM, retrieves data from the serial RX pin via USB and displays it like a simple terminal program. Voila! You now have a serial debugger that works for any PSOC4 project using MiniProg3 as your USB to serial dongle.

Customer was really happy with this. We were able to immediately see his problem and fixed it in about 5 minutes.

Finally, here are all the source files

DTView Firmware : PSOC Creator example project and DTView component

DTViewer Binary : Installer for DTViewer console

ViewerSource : Complete source code for DTViewer console (Requires Visual Studio 2015)

That’s all. Have fun with the new debugging tool.

DTV

CY8CKIT-044 PSoC4200M Real Time Clock

Summary

In my article entitled “FreeRTOS FAT SL – Musing on my Implementation“, I lamented that I was supposed to implement a Real Time Clock so that the reads and writes of files could be timestamped, but didnt.  I knew that the PSoC4200M Real Time Clock is actually really easy to use.  But, I didn’t because I didn’t want to fix the command line interface that I was using.  In this article I will show you how to implement a PSoC4200M Real Time Clock in FreeRTOS.  Then in the next article Ill show you how to implement the FreeRTOS Command Line Interface to set the time and turn on the FreeRTOS FAT SL Clock Driver.

PSoC4200M Real Time Clock Schematic

The first thing to do is copy the FreeRTOS Template project.  Then add the UART and RTC components to the project schematic from the PSoC Creator Component Catalog.

PSoC4200M Real Time Clock Schematic

The PSoC4200M Real Time Clock will have the default settings for the component.

PSoC4200M Real Time Clock Configuration

To make an accurate clock, I want to turn on the Watch Crystal Oscillator which drives the Watch Dog Timers.  To do this, click on the “Clocks” tab of the Design Wide Resources.  Then press edit clock.

PSoC4200M Real Time Clock Configuration DWR

Once you are on the clock editor page, turn on the WCO (by pressing the checkmark in the upper left hand corner).  Then turn on the WDT Timer 0 in the Periodic Timer Mode.  Set the divider to 32768 so that the RTC will get 1 interrupt per second.  You also need to select the source of the RTC to be Timer 0.

PSoC4200M Real Time Clock Low Frequency Clock Configuration

Firmware

In the firmware I create a new task called “uartTask” which just starts the RTC, then prints out the time when the user presses ‘t’.  Obviously I didnt set the clock, so it starts from 12:00:00.  Ill fix that in the next post after I get the FreeRTOS Command Line Interpreter working.

You can find this project called RTC-Example in the workspace PSoC-Filesystem on the IoT Expert GitHub site or git@github.com:iotexpert/PSoC-FileSystem.git

FreeRTOS FAT SL – Musings on my Implementation

Summary

I just finished writing the “last” article about building a FreeRTOS FAT SL filesystem into the Cypress FM24V10 FRAM using a CY8CKIT-044.  My implementation works pretty well…. but I am not really that happy with it.  As I sit here and write this article I am not totally sure what I should do next.

I suppose the first thing to do is talk about the things that I don’t like in what I did.

  1. Real Time Clock
  2. Command Line Interpreter
  3. DMA Media Driver
  4. Include files
  5. F_FS_THREAD_AWARE 0
  6. Template project
  7. Performance Metrics
  8. Wear Leveling
  9. Performance Metrics
  10. Discussion of FAT Filesystems

Real Time Clock

As part of the port, you are supposed to provide psp_rtc.c which has one function, psp_getcurrentimedate.  This function is used to get the time to use as a timestamp on files.  I left it default, which means every transaction is timestamped the same, probably not good.  Moreover, there is an RTC in the PSoC4200M that is on the CY8CKIT-044.  The board also has the watch crystal which drives the RTC populated so there is really no good reason not to turn it on.

FreeRTOS FAT SL PSoC RTC

However, when I wrote the original example the command line interpreter that I build only took one character at a time, so there was no good way to set the clock.   Which brings me to the next problem.

Command Line Interpreter (CLI)

When I originally build the example project my command interpreter just had an infinite loop that waited for a character from the keyboard, then did one command based on that character.  It looks like this:

What I did was cheap and easy… but, FreeRTOS has a CLI built in, so I suppose that I should have used.

DMA Media Driver

When I read and write from the FRAM I put in code that is blocking.  Meaning that it essentially hangs the entire system until they return.  Not really good given that this is an RTOS.  This is what all of the I2C_ functions below do.

There is no reason that I shouldn’t have used the DMA engine to read and write the FRAM which would have freed up the processor.

Include files

I absolutely hate the scheme that I used to name and use the includes in the FreeRTOS FAT SL port.  I should fix this for sure.

F_FS_THREAD_AWARE 0

When I originally tried to compile this project I marked this #define from “config_fat_sl.h” as “1”.  However when I do that, I end up with this error which I should for sure fix as the code is not reentrant and this #define protects you.

An RTOS bug in the FreeRTOS FAT SL Implementation

Template project

My good friend Mark Saunders pointed out PSoC Creator has a new feature which you can use to make template projects.. which I didnt know about until he told me.  Obviously this would be better than what I am doing.

Performance Metrics

I did not collect any performance metrics when I build this project.  How much RAM? Flash?  How long does it take to read and write files?  I don’t know.  Moreover, I put in debugging information into the media driver which was counter productive to good memory usage.  For instance in this snip from the readsector function I define a big ass buffer of 128 bytes on line 134, then I printout a message to the uart each time this function is called.

Error Checking

There are a bunch of places where I could have put in much better error checking, and I didnt.  For instance in this section of the readsector function if the I2C_I2CMasterWriteByte function fails, it probably hangs the I2C bus until the chip is reset… this is bad.  Even when an error occurs, printing a message probably isn’t a good idea (line 146).

Wear Leveling

Many nonvolatile memory chip will wear out if you write them too many time.  Even 100K cycles can easily happen on a key sector of the filesystem for instance sector 0.  One convient thing about the FRAM is that it doesnt wear out.  But, when I started this journey I was originally going to use the PSoC6 development kit which uses a NOR Flash.  The NOR Flash will for sure wear out.  To combat this problem, people have developed wear leveling schemes.  But I don’t address this issue at all with my media driver.

Discussion of FAT Filesystems

As I wrote about the FreeRTOS FAT SL Filesystem I was originally planning a tutorial on file systems.  But as I dug a little bit a whole bunch of issues came up which felt a little bit overwhelming to address.  The issues that were left unaddressed are:

  1. Copywrite of the FAT File System
  2. Efficiency of FAT File Systems
  3. The licensing of the FreeRTOS FAT SL
  4. Other FAT implementations

I suppose that at some point I should come back and look at those issues.

FreeRTOS FAT SL – PSoC Example Project (Part 2)

Summary – Examples using FreeRTOS FAT SL

In the previous several articles I have written about the FreeRTOS FAT SL Filesystem.  This included using the Cypress FM24V10 FRAM, creating an FRAM media driver and building an example project.  This article will show you the C-functions in “extestfs.c” that are used to actually test the filesystem.  Notice that I named all of the functions starting with “ex” which I adopted from the FreeRTOS FAT SL examples.  The functions in this article are all called by the command line interpreter that I built in the previous post.  They include

  • exInit – Initializing the Filesystem
  • exCreateFile – Creating a file in the FileSystem
  • exReadFile – Reading the data from a file
  • exFormat – Formatting the disk
  • exDriveInfo – Printing the drive information
  • exDirectory – Print an “ls” or “dir”

exInit

Before the FreeRTOS FAT SL Filesystem can do anything, you must initialize it.  All this function does is call the function that I created to turn on the file system in the media port.  One thing that is interesting is that it returns an error code that tells you if the file system is formatted or  not.   It figured this out by looking at the data in the first sector of the FRAM.

exCreateFile

This functiom creates a file called “afile.txt” in the FreeRTOS FAT SL filesystem with the ASCII characters for 0-9.  I did something that was probably not helpful in that I made a loop (on line 43) that started a ‘0’ which is also known as 49 (go look at the ASCII table).

This function calls f_open which will create a new file when it is passed the argument “w”.  I also use the function f_putc to output characters to the file.

As I am looking at the code to write this article I realized that I didnt f_close the file (which I have now fixed).

exReadFile

The exReadFile functions reads all of the characters out of the “afile.txt” and prints them to the screen.  It uses the function f_getc which reads one character from the file.  Notice that I open the file in read mode by using the “r” option.

exFormat

The exFormat function calles f_format with the FAT12 option.  It is impossible to use FAT16 and FAT32 which require a much larger media to use.  FAT12 was originally created for use on smallish floppy disk.

exDriveInfo

The exDriveInfo function calls the f_getfreespace function to find out how much space is free for use on the FRAM FreeRTOS FAT SL Filesystem.

exDirectory

The exDirectory function calls the f_findfirst and f_findnext functions to iterate all of the files and directories on the top level of the file system.  The f_findfirst function uses a wildcard regular expression to match filenames. When it finds a file it prints information about that file.

 

FreeRTOS FAT SL FileSystem Porting to PSoC4M

CY8CKIT-044 for FreeRTOS FAT FL FileSystem

Summary of FreeRTOS FAT SL FileSystem Port

In the previous article I discussed the Cypress 24V10 FRAM which I am going to use to store nonvolatile data for the FreeRTOS FAT SL FileSystem.  The “SL” in the name stands for “super light” and was built by HCC Embedded for, get this, embedded applications.

In this article I am going to show you how to build a media driver to make the FreeRTOS FAT SL FileSystem work.  In the next article I will talk about how to actually use the FreeRTOS FAT SL FileSystem on the CY8CKIT-044 using the Cypress FMV24V10 FRAM.

The media driver is pretty simple,  you just need to provide the following functions:

And two structures

  • F_DRIVER – Function pointers to the media driver functions
  • F_PHY – Information about the FRAM

To make all of this work I will start by copying the “ram” driver that was provided as an example (ill call mine framdrv_f.c).  The file that I started with resides in FreeRTOS-Plus/Source/FreeRTOS-Plus-FAT-SL/media-drv/ram/ramdrv_f.c

F_DRIVER Structure

The F_DRIVER structure mostly contains function pointers to the driver functions (which you create).  All throughout the FreeRTOS FAT SL FileSystem code it will do things like :

which calls the function in the media driver structure named “getstatus”.

Here is the exact definition of the F_DRIVER STRUCTURE (found in FreeRTOS-Plus-FAT-SL/api/api_mdriver.h) :

The user_data and user_ptr do not appear to be used anywhere in the FreeRTOS FAT SL FileSystem code, so I am not sure what they had in mind for those variables.

The F_PHY Structure

The other structure that is needed (sort of) is F_PHY.  This structure contains parameters that were originally meant for disk drives and are no longer used.  For the FRAM I will divide up the 128k array into “sectors” of “512” bytes.  For some reason which I don’t understand the sector size must be fixed to 512 bytes.  The history of FAT filesystems is incredibly messy, and I started to dig through it so that I understood the number, but I am not sure that there are enough hours in my life.

As I wrote this article I didnt remember setting up the F_PHY structure… but things still worked (ill address this later in the article).

F_DRVERINIT()

This function sets up the function pointers and marks the in_use variable.

F_GETPHY()

This function returns information about the FRAM including the size (in sectors) and the size of the sectors (in bytes)

FRAM Helper Functions

In order to map sectors to the correct I2C address (remember the FRAM has two banks of memory in two different I2C addresses) and to the correct bank address, I created two function which map “sector” into address and I2C address.

F_READSECTOR()

This function reads 512 bytes that are located in the sector into the RAM buffer pointed to by data.  Notice on lines 26 & 27 I put in debugging information.  In order to read you need to

  • Send a start (line 30)
  • Send the I2C address and the write bit
  • Set the address you want to read from (line 37-38)
  • Send a restart (line 41)
  • read the 512 bytes (lines 44-54)
  • On the last byte NAK (line 47-50)

F_WRITESECTOR()

The write sector is very similar to the read.  To write the data you need to

  • Send a start (line 204)
  • Write the address you want to write to (line 205-206)
  • Write the 512 bytes (lines 208-214)
  • Send a stop (line 215)

F_GETSTATUS()

As I wrote the article I noticed in the documentation that I needed to provide the “F_GETSTATUS” function.  The reason that I had not noticed before was that it was not in the media driver provided in the distribution.  That being said, my implementation always returns a 0 indicating OK.

F_RELEASE()

This function simply set the in_use to 0;

In the next article I will show you the source code for an example project using the FreeRTOS FAT SL Filesystem.

FreeRTOS FAT SL FileSystem – Using the FM24V10 FRAM

Summary

Last week while working on a PSoC FreeRTOS Project, I looked at the CY8CKIT-044 Development kit that I was using and remembered that right under the Ambient Light Sensor there is a Cypress FM24V10 FRAM.  Way back, I started pushing our Development Kit team to put other Cypress parts onto the dev kits…. and because they are awesome, they aggressively started doing that.  One of those chips is the FM24V10 FRAM.  As I looked at the chip, I realized again that I had never really written anything into the FM24V10 FRAM on any of our dev kits, which seems silly after I pushed the dev kit team for them.  I realized that the reason I had never used the FM24V10 FRAM was I didn’t have a nifty way to write files.  But, while working on the other FreeRTOS projects, I noticed the FreeRTOS FAT SL Filesystem is built into FreeRTOS.  The next couple (3?) articles I will talk about making the FreeRTOS FAT SL Filesystem work on a PSoC4200M with a FM24V10 I2C FRAM.

CY8CKIT-044 with FM24V10 FRAM

The Cypress FM24V10 FRAM

The “F” in FRAM stands for ferroelectric.  What that means is each of the memory cells is a little magnet.  So what you say?  Well the “what” is that FRAMs don’t wear out (unlike Flash), you can write individual cells (unlike Flash), and it is super low power, it is plenty fast (I2C = 3.4MBS), and it retains data for a long long time (151 years).

That list sounds great.  Actually really great.  But, what is the but?  There are two answers to that question.  The first answer is there is a density penalty, the biggest I2C FRAM is 1Mb where you can buy a 1Gb NOR Flash or even bigger NAND Flash.  The next issue is price.  The digikey pricing for a 128Kb FRAM is $12.76 or 9.9c/kb and a 1GB NOR Flash is $14.97 or 0.0014c/kb.  That means an FRAM is 6724 x as expensive per bit.

How do I use it?  The FRAM is attached to the I2C pins on the CY8CKIT-044.  That means that I can talk to it with either the Bridge Control Panel, or with the PSoC.  To start with I will show you the Bridge Control Panel.  First, I probe the I2C bus, and I see that there are three I2C devices.

  • 0x0F = The I2C Accelerometer (which I wrote about here)
  • 0x50= The first 64K of FRAM
  • 0x51 = The second 64K of FRAM

The 128K FRAM is divided into two banks which are accessed on separate I2C addresses.  By splitting 128K into two blocks of 64K the chip designers optimized the addressing of the memory.  In order to access 64K you need 16-bits, which means to access 128K you need 17-bits.  This would have required sending a whole extra byte of address when you really only needed 1 of those 8 bits.  They avoid this problem by having two addresses.

The FM24V10 FRAM is easy to use as it implements an EzI2C (like) protocol.  EZI2C keeps an internal address pointer.  The pointer is automatically incremented each time you do an I2C transaction.  When you do a write transaction, the first two bytes you write are placed into the address pointer.  I say “EZI2C like” because the pointer is not retained between transactions.  Some examples:

If I want to write 0x56 into location 0x0123 I would issue

  • I2C Start
  • I2C Write to I2C address 0x50
  • Send 0x01, 0x02 (which write the address pointer)
  • Send 0x56
  • I2C Stop

I can do that sequence with the Bridge Control Panel command “W 50 01 23 56 P;”  The “W” stands for “send a start and send the 7-bit address 0x50 (left shifted 1) and send a ‘0’ for write”.  For some reason the engineers at Philips decided that the I2C protocol would have 7-bit addressing and then 1 bit to represent write or read.  When you talk about I2C there is always confusion about “8-bit address” versus “7-bit address”.  When they talk about 8-bit address they are talking about the 7-bit address shifted left 1 bit and then or-ed with the read or write bit.  Here is a picture from the bridge control panel:

And the same thing from the logic analyzer.

Once I have written 0x56 into address 0x0123, I can read it back by a “w 50 01 23 r 50 x p;” which sends:

  • I2C Start
  • I2C Write to I2C address 0x50
  • Send 0x01, 0x02 (which write the address pointer)
  • I2C Restart
  • Sends 0x50 (shifted left) or-ed with “read”
  • Reads the byte
  • I2C Stop

In the transaction output window below, you can see that the “x” is replaced with “56” meaning that it read the previously written value back.

The only other interesting thing about the protocol is that once you have sent and address, you can keep reading, or writing without sending the address again.  For instance to write 01, 02, 03, 04 to address 23, 23,25 and 26 you can send “W 50 00 23 01 02 03 04 p”, then you can read it back with “W 50 00 23 r 50 x x x x p;”

In the next Article I will start the process of using the Free RTOS File System to write and read from the I2C FRAM.

FreeRTOS PSoC Template Project

Summary

In the last article I showed you clever FreeRTOS PSoC Component… and the talked about some of the issues that I had with it.  In this article I will talk about a self-contained FreeRTOS PSoC Template project that includes everything for FreeRTOS and Tracealyzer all in one project.  My idea was that when I start a new project I will just make a copy of the template project, rename it, then move on.

My FreeRTOS PSoC Template has

  • FreeRTOS with the files in in the same directory (i.e. not referenced externally)
  • Tracealyzer with the files in the same directory & all of the streamports including RTT and the UART DMA
  • All of the files organized into PSoC Creator folders
  • A template main.c
  • All of the build settings configured

This project is checked into GitHub and you can find it git@github.com:iotexpert/PSoC-FreeRTOS-Template.git

Building the FreeRTOS PSoC Template

I started the process by creating a blank PSoC project called “FreeRTOS_Template”.  I then went into the Windows Explorer and copied the entire FreeRTOS source directory into the FreeRTOS PSoC Template Project directory.  Then I copied the Percepio TraceRecorder library into the FreeRTOS PSoC Template project.

FreeRTOS PSoC Template Directory Structure

By having both of the source directories in my project it isolated this project from changes in the FreeRTOS or the TraceRecorder.  Obviously that is a double edged sword.  The next thing that I did was use the Windows Explorer to copy FreeRTOSConfig.h, trcConfig.h, trcSnapshotConfig.h and trcStreamingConfig.h into the project.   Once all of the files were in my project directory is was time to fix up the PSoC Creator Project.

To do this I created a folder called “FreeRTOS_Source” in the “Header Files” and “Source Files” folders in my template project.  You can do this by right clicking and selecting “Add->New Folder”.  Then I added all of the appropriate .h and .c files from FreeRTOS source directory.  This gives me the following project view:

FreeRTOS PSoC Template PSoC Creator Header Files

And Source Files (notice that I also added heap_4.c which I generally use for memory management)

FreeRTOS PSoC Template PSoC Creator Source Files

Then I add the configuration files FreeRTOSConfig.h, trcConfig.h, trcSnapshotConfig.h, trcStreamingConfig.h and trcStreamingport.h.  Next I do the same thing for the TraceRecorder library which makes my project look like this:

Then I modify the build settings to add the include directories:

FreeRTOS PSoC Template Build Settings

FreeRTOS PSoC Template PSoC Creator Include Path

Now you can modify the FreeRTOSConfig.h to include all of the Tracealyzer stuff:

Then I setup a new tab in the schematic to contain the DMA UART Streamport.  You can read all about the UART DMA Streamport in this article.

FreeRTOS PSoC Template PSoC Creator Streamport Schematic

By putting that part of the stream port on a separate schematic page I can now do a right click and disable the page when I am not using the Tracealyzer streamport.  Disabling a page of the schematic completely removes everything from the build.

PSoC Creator Schematic Disable Settings

Next I create files called FreeRTOS_Start.h/.c to put in the startup code:

Finally I make a template main.c that starts everything and has a simple ledTask and instructions for changing Memory Management scheme and the TraceRecorder.

 

Topic Description
FreeRTOS: A PSoC4 FreeRTOS Port An introduction to making FreeRTOS work on PSoC 4
FreeRTOS PSoC Examples Using multiple tasks in FreeRTOS
FreeRTOS Queue Example Using a queue to communicate between tasks
PSoC 6 FreeRTOS - The First Example Booting FreeRTOS on PSoC 6
FreeRTOS Binary Semaphore An first example of a binary semaphore
FreeRTOS Binary Semaphore (Part 2) Removing polling in the UART Task
FreeRTOS Counting Semaphore An example using a counting semaphore
PSoC FreeRTOS Reading I2C Sensors with a shared I2C Bus
PSoC FreeRTOS Task Notify A light weight scheme to replace Semaphores
PSoC FreeRTOS Task Notification Values A very light weight method to transfer one word of information into a task

FreeRTOS PSoC Component

Summary

This weekend I found myself down a rabbit hole, beating my head on the wall trying to make a USB driver work properly inside of Parallels & Windows 10 on my Mac (which I still don’t have quite right).  While going through that excruciating process I ended up creating 3-4-5 different FreeRTOS PSoC projects, which although not difficult, is still a bit of a pain as it requires 1/2 dozen step.  After reflecting on it a while I decided that I needed something easier.  The obvious thing to do was to build a FreeRTOS PSoC Component, which I did, but eventually abandoned (Ill talk about that process in the next section).  After the component idea was abandoned I decided to just make a template project that could be used to start a FreeRTOS PSoC Project (the next Article).

In this article I will show you:

  • An example project using a clever FreeRTOS PSoC Component that I found on GitHub built by E2ForLife
  • A discussion of the implementation details of that FreeRTOS PSoC Component
  • A discussion of problems with that implementation which lead me to build a template project.

FreeRTOS PSoC Component Example Project

When I first started looking at FreeRTOS I wasn’t totally sure where to start.  When I googled FreeRTOS PSoC, one of the first hits was this repo which contains a PSoC Component that was built by “E2ForLife”.  I really liked the idea of a component based FreeRTOS implementation, as all you would need to do is place the components… and then away you go.  The more that I looked at the component the more that I liked what E2ForLife had done.  When I cloned his repo, there was “nothing” in it, but it turns out there is another branch called “Implement-PSoC5” which makes me think that he was partially done (he hasn’t been changed since August 2015)

First, his example project.  When you look at the schematic you see a nice looking FreeRTOS PSoC Symbol (obviously E2ForLife draws way better than me).

FreeRTOS PSoC Component

When you double click the component you see all of the stuff that is normally in FreeRTOSConfig.h which you can set using the GUI instead of the FreeRTOSConfig.h

FreeRTOS PSoC Component Configuration

When you “Generate Application” you can see that he setup all of the FreeRTOS files to come into the Generated Source automatically (though with different names)

FreeRTOS PSoC Component API

And his FreeRTOS PSoC Component example project is straight forward

He built a function called “FreeRTOS_Start()” which installs the interrupt vectors then starts up the scheduler.

And when you run the FreeRTOS PSoC Component project you get the nice blinking LED (Red and Green)

CY8CKIT-042

FreeRTOS PSoC Component

After downloading the project, then opening it I first wanted to look at the components.  You can do this by clicking the “Components” tab in the workspace explorer.  It looks like he created (or was planning to create) several other components in addition to the “FreeRTOS”.

FreeRTOS PSoC Component

When you double click on the “FreeRTOS_v8_2.cysym” you will get an editable view of the symbol.

FreeRTOS PSoC Component Symbol

When you right click on the blank part of the canvas, PSoC Creator will bring up this menu.

PSoC Creator Configuration

On the properties menu you can configure which tab the component belongs to in the Component Catalog.  In this case he created a tab called “Community” which looks like this in the actual Component Catalog.

PSoC Creator Component Catalog

To make that happen he setup the “Doc.CatalogPlacement” to be “Community/Operating System/FreeRTOS” (on the properties menu)

FreeRTOS PSoC Component Parameter Configuration

The next thing that he did was add a whole bunch of Symbol Parameters which will let the user change the setup of FreeRTOS. Each  of these parameters show up as an editable field on the component customers (in the schematic).

FreeRTOS PSoC Parameter

In the picture above you can see that he created two new “enumerated” datatypes called “FreeRTOS_CheckStackOverFlowType” “FreeRTOS_MemMangType”.  In the picture below you can see the legal values for that type.  This lets him restrict the things that the user of the component can select when he places it in his schematic.

FreeRTOS PSoC Component Configuration

Here is what the component looks like when the user actually uses it.  You can see the legal fields (from above) and the legal values for those fields (from above)

FreeRTOS PSoC Component Configuration

The next thing that he did was copy all of the FreeRTOS files into component API.

FreeRTOS PSoC Component API

If you remember each FreeRTOS project needs to have a file called “FreeRTOSConfig.h”.  But, that file doesn’t appear to exist in the list above.  How is that?  Remember that when PSoC Creator builds a project it copies the API into your generated source directory, but it renames each of the files to be INSTANCE_NAME_filename.  In this example, “Config.h” will become “FreeRTOS_Config.h” (FreeRTOS is the instance name in the schematic)

In FreeRTOS each of the features of the RTOS turn into a #define that is 0 or 1.  When the component was created he modified “Config.h” so that each of the parameters on the component set values for the #defines in the “Config.h” file.  And there is a bunch of them so that must have taken a good bit of work.  Here is an example of a section of his “Config.h”.  Each place you see the back-tick $parameter back-tick PSoC Creator will substitute the value of the parameter (I am typing back-tick because WordPress interprets the actual symbol to mean something special and I don’t know how to get it into the text)

Because each filename changes name, he had to go fix all of the #includes to look like this example from croutine.c (this was a bunch of work)

He also wanted to be able to have all of the FreeRTOS memory management schemes included in the project at one time.  To solve this problem he put an #if around all of the code in heap_1, heap_2 … that adds and removes the appropriate memory manager.

A FreeRTOS PSoC Template Project

When I started working on FreeRTOS I knew that I wanted to use V9.0.  But the component was setup for V8.2.  So I launched into the process of converting the component.  This turned out to be a colossal pain in the ass because of the massive number of “small” changes.  In addition I didn’t really like having to change the names of key files (even the stupidly named semphr.h).  Moreover, the source code as a component debate was raging wildly inside of Cypress and in general is on the way out.  So I decided to implement this as a template project instead of a component.

All that being said, what E2ForLife did I continue to think was really clever.

Topic Description
FreeRTOS: A PSoC4 FreeRTOS Port An introduction to making FreeRTOS work on PSoC 4
FreeRTOS PSoC Examples Using multiple tasks in FreeRTOS
FreeRTOS Queue Example Using a queue to communicate between tasks
PSoC 6 FreeRTOS - The First Example Booting FreeRTOS on PSoC 6
FreeRTOS Binary Semaphore An first example of a binary semaphore
FreeRTOS Binary Semaphore (Part 2) Removing polling in the UART Task
FreeRTOS Counting Semaphore An example using a counting semaphore
PSoC FreeRTOS Reading I2C Sensors with a shared I2C Bus
PSoC FreeRTOS Task Notify A light weight scheme to replace Semaphores
PSoC FreeRTOS Task Notification Values A very light weight method to transfer one word of information into a task

PSoC FreeRTOS Task Notification Value

Summary

In the previous article I showed you how to use the FreeRTOS task notification mechanism to replace a binary semaphore.  In this article I will build PSoC FreeRTOS Task Notification Value firmware.  Every FreeRTOS task has one built-in “uint32_t” which you can use to pass information between the task that sends the notification and the task that receives the notification.  In this article, instead of using the task notification as a binary semaphore, I will use it as a Queue of depth 1 that can hold one 32-bit word.  I will also show you a lesson that I learned about the interrupt registers in the SCB UART.

PSoC FreeRTOS Task Notification Value

I start by copying the project 9-TaskNotify and calling it 10-TaskNotifyValue.  I thought that it would be interesting to pass the cause of the UART interrupt to the UART Task, so that it could be told to the user.  To do this I call “xTaskNotifyFromISR” instead of “vTaskGiveFromISR”.   This function lets me set the value of the FreeRTOS Task notification value, is case to the bit mask of the cause of the UART interrupt.  The function also lets you specific if you want to

  • eNoAction – don’t do anything (this is what the xTaskNotifyFromISR does)
  • eSetBits – or the current notification value with the value you send
  • eIncrement – increment the notification value by 1 (in which case it ignore the value you send)
  • eSetValueWithOverwrite – replace the current notification value with the value passed in this function
  • eSetValueWithoutOverwrite – if there is no pending write, then write the value from this function into the notification value

In the UART_Task I take the value and then clear all of the bit (aka set it to 0) when I exit.

New Learning

When I first wrote the program I had something “weird” happening.  Specifically it looked like I was getting the interrupt service routine called twice:

I originally wrote the code like this:

But, what happens is:

  1. Turn off interrupts
  2. Clear the interrupt source (meaning turn off the flag in the SCB that says there is a character in the Rx Buffer)
  3. One or so UART clock cycles later the flag is reset (because there is still something in the UART Rx Buffer)
  4. Send the notification to the UART Task
  5. The UART Task wakes up and processes the UART Rx Buffer
  6. The UART Task turns back on the interrupts
  7. The interrupt is called because the RX_NOT_EMPTY flag is still set (it is set until it is clear)
  8. The interrupt handler clears the flag (which isn’t reset this time because there is nothing in the Rx buffer)
  9. The interrupt handler sends the notification
  10. The UART Task wakes up again… prints out the Flag..
  11. The UART Task tries to read out of the Rx Buffer… but there isn’t anything in it.

Each time I start thinking that I know what I am doing, I find something else to learn.  I suppose that is what makes this whole thing fun though.

Topic Description
FreeRTOS: A PSoC4 FreeRTOS Port An introduction to making FreeRTOS work on PSoC 4
FreeRTOS PSoC Examples Using multiple tasks in FreeRTOS
FreeRTOS Queue Example Using a queue to communicate between tasks
PSoC 6 FreeRTOS - The First Example Booting FreeRTOS on PSoC 6
FreeRTOS Binary Semaphore An first example of a binary semaphore
FreeRTOS Binary Semaphore (Part 2) Removing polling in the UART Task
FreeRTOS Counting Semaphore An example using a counting semaphore
PSoC FreeRTOS Reading I2C Sensors with a shared I2C Bus
PSoC FreeRTOS Task Notify A light weight scheme to replace Semaphores
PSoC FreeRTOS Task Notification Values A very light weight method to transfer one word of information into a task

PSoC FreeRTOS Task Notify

Summary

I have been writing a bunch of articles about implementing PSoC FreeRTOS so, this morning I was reading the FreeRTOS manual (yes I am one of those…) and I noticed a section in the API guide that I hadn’t see before… Task Notifications.  Every task in the FreeRTOS has a built in 32-bit integer notification value.  This value is super light weight and can be used like a task specific counting semaphore, or a signaling bit mask, or binary semaphore.  The API includes:

It seems like this API is good for the situations when your Semaphore has a specific task target in mind.  I thought that this would be a perfect scheme to have a PSoC FreeRTOS UART ISR signal the UART Handling task that there is data available to do something with.

Setup the PSoC FreeRTOS Project

I start this process by making a copy of “1-BlinkingLED” (which already has all of the FreeRTOS stuff in it) and naming it “9-TaskNotify”.  Then I add a UART to the schematic and name it “UART”

PSoC FreeRTOS Schematic

I attach the UART to the right pins on the CY8CKIT-044 kit.

PSoC Creator Pin Assignment
Next I turn on the interrupt which will be called when there is data in the receive FIFO.

PSoC UART Configuration

PSoC FreeRTOS UART Code

Now that the schematic is all configured I update my firmware.  The function “uartHandler” is called when there is data in the UART RX FIFO.  It turns of the interrupts for the UART (which I will turn back on after I have cleared the data in the input buffer), clears the interrupt  (so that it will stop pending) and then sends the notification to the UART_Task.

The UART Task just registers the handler… then while(1)’s until the end of time.  It waits for a notification, then reads data out of the RX fifo and puts out,  then re-enables the interrupts.

Topic Description
FreeRTOS: A PSoC4 FreeRTOS Port An introduction to making FreeRTOS work on PSoC 4
FreeRTOS PSoC Examples Using multiple tasks in FreeRTOS
FreeRTOS Queue Example Using a queue to communicate between tasks
PSoC 6 FreeRTOS - The First Example Booting FreeRTOS on PSoC 6
FreeRTOS Binary Semaphore An first example of a binary semaphore
FreeRTOS Binary Semaphore (Part 2) Removing polling in the UART Task
FreeRTOS Counting Semaphore An example using a counting semaphore
PSoC FreeRTOS Reading I2C Sensors with a shared I2C Bus
PSoC FreeRTOS Task Notify A light weight scheme to replace Semaphores
PSoC FreeRTOS Task Notification Values A very light weight method to transfer one word of information into a task

Percepio Tracealyzer: A PSoC DMA Streamport

Summary

In the last Article I analyzed the performance problems of my firmware based PSoC Tracealyzer Streamport … which was terrible.  Although it has been a long time since I used the PSoC4M DMA engine, I knew that it would solve my problem.  In this article Ill show how to use the PSoC DMA, then Ill build and analyze a PSoC DMA Streamport for Tracealyzer.

PSoC4 UART DMA

The DMA block that shows up in the PSoC4200M, PSoC 4200L and PSoC4BLE is pretty amazing.  It can do a bunch of stuff.  Here is a snapshot that I took out of the TRM.  This block sits on the main AHB bus inside of the PSoC.  It can act as a master (see the block that says Master I/F) and read and write any of things in the ARM address space including the Flash, SRAM, and all of the peripherals.  It has an incoming trigger which can get the transfers going and when it is done it can trigger an interrupt or another DMA channel.  The Slave I/F allows the CPU to program the block.  The device has 8-channels with each channel having 2 descriptors (so it can ping pong).

PSoC4 DMA

Before I tried to make the PSoC DMA Streamport I started by looking at the example projects by pressing “File->Code Example”

PSoC Creator Example

Then filtering for DMA

PSoC Creator Example Project - DMA

Finally creating project.  This project uses two DMA channels, one for the UART receive and one for the UART Transfer.  It lets you type characters into the UART, it saves them in one of the RAM buffers, then when you have typed 8, it DMAs them back into the Transmit channel of the UART.  This example ping-pings back and forth between two RAM buffers.

PSoC Creator DMA Example

I decided that it would be best to build a bare metal DMA project called “test-uart” to prove that I understood.  This project will DMA transfer an array of characters to the UART when the user presses the switch on the board or a “s” on the keyboard.  The first thing to do is build the schematic with a UART, a DMA block,  two output pins, and input pin and an interrupt.

PSoC DMA Streamport

Place an SCB UART. then configure it (change the name, but accept all of the defaults)

PSoC Creator UART

Then click on the advanced tab.  Turn on the DMA for Transfer (TX Output) and set the “FIFO Level” to 7.  This will cause the UART to assert DMA signal anytime the transmit FIFO has less than 7 bytes.  In  other words … FEED ME!!!

After configuring the UART, Set the PINs

PSoC DMA Streamport Pin Assignment

Next configure the DMA.  The memory array that I have will be “uint8_t” aka “char”.  So the input needs to be “bytes”.  The UART FIFO hold Words… aka 4 bytes.  So I need to configure the transfers to do “Byte to Word”.  After the DMA transfer is done, I setup the DMA to create an interrupt (so that I can reset everything in the CPU) and to invalidate the descriptor.

PSoC DMA Streamport

In the firmware works by

  • Turning on the UART
  • Enabling the DMA
  • Setting up the channel with the address of the buffer that I am going to write to (aka the TX FIFO) and asking for an interrupt

Then looping:

  • When the User presses “s” or the switch, I set myFlag to be 1.
  • If it is 1 and the channel is inactive, then initialize the “source” address, setup the number of transfer elements to be the number in my array, validate the descriptor, and turn on the channel.

When the channel turns on, the Tx fifo will be empty so it will assert the Tx Out, which will make the DMA keep triggering and copying 1 byte at a time into the FIFO.  While this is happening, the UART will try to empty the fifo by sending the bytes.  Finally when the DMA reaches the end of the RAM buffer, it will stop, and at some point the TX FIFO will finish emptying.  The DMA will trigger the interrupt to toggle the BLUE LED.  And the whole process can start again.

PSoC DMA Streamport

Now that I understand how to use the DMA, I can create the PSoC DMA Streamport by copying the project “1-BlionkingLED_UART_TRACE” project and calling it “1-BlinkingLED_UART_TRCE_DMA”.  Next, add the DMA and modify the UART.

PSoC DMA Streamport

Configure the UART

PSoC DMA Streamport - UART Configuration

Turn on the UART DMA and set the level to 7

Configure the DMA Block

PSoC DMA Streamport Configuration

Make byte transfers and byte –> word.

PSoC DMA Streamport - DMA Configuration

Finally modify the trcStreamingPort.c – AKA the PSoC DMA Streamport file.  Specifically you need to fix up the PSoC_Transmit to send out the data when the TraceRecorder buffer is full.

  • If the DMA is busy… then wait until the previous transaction is done.
  • Then setup the DMA and let it rip.

The only other thing that needs to happen is configure the DMA in main.c

Testing the PSoC DMA Streamport

Now when I startup the Tracealyzer, here is what I get:

PSoC DMA Streamport - New CPU Load

It looks like I solved my problem because that is way way better than:

PSoC DMA Streamport - Terrible Performance

As always you can find all of these projects on the IotExpert GitHub site or git@github.com:iotexpert/PSoC-Tracelyzer.git

Article Description
Percepio Tracealyzer & PSoC An Introduction to Percepio Tracealyzer on the Cypress PSoC
Percepio Tracealyzer RTT Streamport - PSoC4200M Make the JLINK RTT Library work with Tracealyzer
Percepio Tracealyzer PSoC UART Streamport Creating a UART Streamport
Percepio Tracealyzer - Analyzing the PSoC Tracealyzer Streamport Figure out what is broken in the UART Streamport
Percepio Tracealyzer - Using PSoC DMA to Fix the UART Streamport Implementing PSoC DMA to improve the CPU Utilization
Percepio Tracealyzer - Running on PSoC6 Porting the Percepio Tracealyzer to PSoC6

Percepio Tracealyzer PSoC UART Streamport

Summary

In the last Article I showed you how to use the JLINK RTT Streamport to make Tracealyzer work.  When I did that port I didn’t really like having to use a JLink, it seemed like a pain to have another box.  I knew that it was possible to make a UART based Streamport.  So, that is what I am going to do, create a Tracealyzer PSoC Streamport.  This Article is going to be broken up into two parts.  In Part 1 I will show you a software based port and the problems that it creates.  In Part 2 I will show you how to use DMA to hopefully (as I haven’t done the work yet) make it work much better.  I was hoping this morning when I started working on this Article that it would only take me a couple of hours, but that did not turn out to be the case as I ran into a PSoC Creator bug which made it hard to figure out what was going on.

Cypress USB Serial Bridge & CY8CKIT-049

If you remember from the last article, the Tracealyzer needs to stream about 20KBs.  That is a big B as in Bytes.  Which means that a 115200 Kbs (aka 14.4 KBs) UART probably won’t do the trick.  That is OK as the PSoC SCB UART can run at up to 921600 aka 115.2 KBs.  The problem is the Kitprog bridge on my development kit is limited to 115200 (I’m not sure why)  I didn’t realize that limitation this morning when I started working on this problem.  But it turns out that the CY8CKIT-049 has a Cypress USB Serial Bridge.which is used to boatload the PSoC4200.  And… it is designed to break off the kit.

CY8CKIT-049

So I broke it off and gave it to my lab assistant to solder (he isn’t normally that grumpy, but he stayed up all night at a birthday party)

Nicholas the Lab Tech

Now I have two wires which I can use to talk to the CY8CKIT-044 UART.

Cypress USB Serial Bridge

After I got the wires on the bridge, I installed the USB Serial Configuration Utility and set the chip up to be 921600 baud.  To do this, run the utility.

USB Serial Configuration Utility

Connect to your bridge, in this case the CY7C65211-24LTXI

USB Serial Configuration Utility

Then pick the SCB (which stands for Serial Communication Block)

USB Serial Configuration Utility

Click the configure, then set the baud to 921600.

USB Serial Configuration Utility

Now, I wire the two kits together (the Jlink is just sitting there)

Percepio Tracelyzer PSoC Setup

Creating a Tracealyzer PSoC UART Streamport

The first thing to do is modify the previous project to also have a UART.

PSoC Creator

Then connect the UART to Pins P3[0] & P3[1]

PSoC Creator

To make the Tracealyzer PSoC Streamport work I make a copy of the TraceRecorder/streamports/USB_CDC and called it PSoC_UART.  After I cut all all of the ST USB crap, I realized that all I need to provide is a

  • A function to receive bytes … called PSoC_Receive
  • A function to transmit bytes… called PSoC_Transmit

Next you need to modify these 10 CPP Macros to support the Tracealyzer PSoC Streamport.   (I only had to modify INIT, READ and SEND)

  • TRC_STREAM_PORT_ALLOCATE_FIELDS
  • TRC_STREAM_PORT_MALLOC
  • TRC_STREAM_PORT_INIT
  • TRC_STREAM_PORT_ALLOCATE_EVENT
  • TRC_STREAM_PORT_ALLOCATE_DYNAMIC_EVENT
  • TRC_STREAM_PORT_COMMIT_EVENT
  • TRC_STREAM_PORT_READ_DATA
  • TRC_STREAM_PORT_PERIODIC_SEND_DATA
  • TRC_STREAM_PORT_ON_TRACE_BEGIN
  • TRC_STREAM_PORT_ON_TRACE_END

In addition I provide function prototypes for PSoC_Receive and PSoC_Transmit which are called by TRC_STREAM_PORT_READ_DATA and TRC_STREAM_PORT_PERIODIC_SEND_DATA

The last thing to make this work is provide the C function to read and write the UART by modifying trcStreamingPort.c

There at two things that are a bit goofy.

  • The return values for both of these function is not used by the calling functions… and is not defined what it means.
  • The 3rd parameter of both functions is defined as int32_t, but in the TraceRecorder library it is defined as int.  This makes a warning, which I got rid of by fixing the bug in the Percepio code.

Testing

To test this you need to change the Tracealyzer settings from JLink to Serial and fix the COM port and baud rate.

Percepio Tracelyzer PSoC Setup

When I built this code originally, I tried 115200 baud.  But it didn’t work at all (it locked up FreeRTOS).  Then I tried 921600 which locked up the Tracealyzer.  I am running Tracealyzer and PSoC Creator on a Mac in a VMWare Fusion Windows 7 box and I am pretty sure that there is a USB bridging problem (I am going to try it on a Windows box).  After grinding for a while I found out that both 230400 and 460800 both worked but both showed something very funny, look at the data:

230400 Baud

Percepio Tracelyzer PSoC - Streaming Data Percepio Tracelyzer PSoC - Streaming Data

460800 Baud

Percepio Tracelyzer PSoC - Streaming Data

Percepio Tracelyzer PSoC - Streaming Data

I knew that my implementation of the Percepio Tracealyzer PSoC Streamport would be demanding on the CPU, but I did not predict that it would take 30-50% of the CPU.  This is definitely a problem as the JLink RTT Streamport only takes 0.4% of the CPU.  To fix this I am going to try using the PSoC4200M DMA to automatically transfer the buffers to the UART.  Hopefully that will make my Tracealyzer PSoC streamport better.  But that is for the next Article.

As always you can find all of these projects on the IotExpert GitHub site or git@github.com:iotexpert/PSoC-Tracelyzer.git

Article Description
Percepio Tracealyzer & PSoC An Introduction to Percepio Tracealyzer on the Cypress PSoC
Percepio Tracealyzer RTT Streamport - PSoC4200M Make the JLINK RTT Library work with Tracealyzer
Percepio Tracealyzer PSoC UART Streamport Creating a UART Streamport
Percepio Tracealyzer - Analyzing the PSoC Tracealyzer Streamport Figure out what is broken in the UART Streamport
Percepio Tracealyzer - Using PSoC DMA to Fix the UART Streamport Implementing PSoC DMA to improve the CPU Utilization
Percepio Tracealyzer - Running on PSoC6 Porting the Percepio Tracealyzer to PSoC6