In computer networks, we are trying to increase the transmission speed of data. Since data is nothing but electrical signals. How these electric signals can be converted into bits so quickly? This conversion is done by ADC - DAC. We can’t control the speed of computation of ADC then how can we translate the electric signals to bits so quickly. Next, Is this ADC integrated in our computer chipset?
Also, does it mean that every peripheral has ADC. For example, NIC card will have ADC. Is the information carried in the LAN cable like CAT 5, 6 are analog in nature?
You clock bits in by detecting a rising edge on a signal wired up to one of the pins of your chip. Then the rise lasts for a certain period of time, but only a fraction of a millisecond. There's a bit of tolerance so sender and receiver don't have to be exactly synchronised. The chip then transfers the bit to a buffer in very low level code. When it has a byte, slightly higher level code transfers the byte to another buffer, then the next level is user level - we have a stream of input bytes.
Whilst the wire is of course analogue, that is not analogue to digital conversion. Analogue to digital conversion is where we measure the signal, quantise it, then create a binary representation in place value notation.
Related
I have a STM32F417IG microcontroller an external 16bit-DAC (TI DAC81404) that is supposed to generate a Signal with a sampling rate of 32kHz. The communication via SPI should not involve any CPU resources. That is why I want to use a timer triggered DMA to shift the data with a rate of 32kHz to the SPI data register in order to send the data to the DAC.
Information about the DAC
Whenever the DAC receives a channel address and the new corresponding 16bit value the DAC will renew its output voltage to the new received value. This is achieved by:
Pulling the CS/NSS/SYNC – pin to low
Sending the 24bit/3 byte long message and
Pulling the CS back to a high state
The first 8bit of the message are containing among other information the information where the output voltage should be applied. The next and concurrently the last 16bit are containing the new value.
Information about STM32
Unfortunately the microcontroller of ST are having a hardware problem with the NSS-pin. Starting the communication via SPI the NSS-pin is pulled low. Now the pin is low as long as SPI is enabled (. (reference manual page 877). That is sadly not the right way for communicate with device that are in need of a rise of the NSS after each message. A “solution” would be to toggle the NSS-pin manually as suggested in the manual (When a master is communicating with SPI slaves which need to be de-selected between transmissions, the NSS pin must be configured as GPIO or another GPIO must be used and toggled by software.)
Problem
If DMA is used the ordinary way the CPU is only used when starting the process. By toggling the NSS twice every 1/32000 s this leads to corresponding CPU interactions.
My question is whether I missed something in order to achieve a communication without CPU.
If not my goal is now to reduce the CPU processing time to a minimum. My pIan is to trigger DMA with a timer. So every 1/32k seconds the data register of SPI is filled with the 24bit data for the DAC.
The NSS could be toggled by a timer interrupt.
I have problems achieving it because I do not know how to link the timer with the DMA of the SPI using HAL-functions. Can anyone help me?
This is a tricky one. It might be difficult to avoid having one interrupt per sample with this combination of DAC and microcontroller.
However, one approach I would look at is to have the CS signal created as a timer output-compare (like PWM). You can use multiple channels of the same timer or link multiple timers to create a delay between the CS output and the DMA trigger. You should allow some room for jitter, because depending on what else is happening the DMA might not respond instantly. This won't hurt your DAC output signal though, because it only outputs the value on the rising edge of chip select (called SYNC in the DAC datasheet) which will still be from your first timer.
I'm testing the SPI capabilities of STM32H7. For this I'm using the SPI examples provided in STM32CubeH7 on 2 Nucleo-H743ZI boards. I will perhaps not keep this code in my own development, rigth now the goal is to understand how SPI is working and what bandwith I can get in the different modes (with DMA, with cache enabled or not, etc...).
I'd like to share the figures I've computed, as it doesn't seem very high. In the example, if I understood correctly, the CPU is # 400Mhz and the SPI bus frequency # 100MHz.
For polling mode I've measured the number of cycles of the call to function HAL_SPI_TransmitReceive.
For DMA I've measured between call to HAL_SPI_TransmitReceive_DMA and call to the transfer complete callback.
Measurements of cycles where made with SysTick clocked on internal clock. Since there is no low power usage, it should be accurate.
I've just modified ST's examples to send a buffer of 1KB.
I get around 200.000 CPU cycles in polling mode, which means around 2MB/s
And around 3MB/s in DMA mode.
Since the SPI clock runs at 100Mhz I would have expected much more, especially in DMA mode, what do you think ? Is there something wrong in my test procedure ?
I am looking to receive MIDI messages to control a microcontroller based synthesizer and I am working on understanding the MIDI protocol so I may implement a MIDI handler. I've read MIDI is transmitted at 31.25kHz without a dedicated clock line - must I sample the line at 31.25kHz with the microcontroller in order to receive MIDI bytes?
The MIDI specification says:
The hardware MIDI interface operates at 31.25 (+/- 1%) Kbaud, asynchronous, with a start bit, 8 data bits (D0 to D7), and a stop bit. […] Bytes are sent LSB first.
This describes a standard UART protocol; you can simply use the UART hardware that most microcontrollers have built in. (The baud rate of 31250 Hz was chosen because it can be easily derived from a 1 Mhz (or multiple) clock.)
If you really wanted to implement the receiver in software, you would sample the input signal at a higher rate to able to reliably detect the level in the middle of each bit; for details, see What exactly is the start bit error in UART? and How does UART know the difference between data bits and start/stop bits?
I am trying to program an adc in stm32f4. I want to know what are the roles of these five instructions?
ADC_CommonInitStructure.ADC_Mode = ADC_Mode_Independent;
ADC_CommonInitStructure.ADC_Prescaler = ADC_Prescaler_Div2;
ADC_CommonInitStructure.ADC_DMAAccessMode = ADC_DMAAccessMode_Disabled;
ADC_CommonInitStructure.ADC_TwoSamplingDelay = ADC_TwoSamplingDelay_5Cycles;
ADC_InitStructure.ADC_DataAlign = ADC_DataAlign_Right
ADC_Mode_Independent The ADC functions independently of others. Other modes allow two ADC to be read at exactly the same time (for power measurement) or interleaved (2 or 3 ADC cooperate to read the same channel more often)
ADC_Prescaler_Div2 - How fast the ADC works its SAR algorithm
ADC_DMAAccessMode_Disabled - DMA provides the ability to take a number of readings and have them automatically put into a table in memory
ADC_TwoSamplingDelay_5Cycles - There are two registers, this one one is a delay between successive readings, the other is the sampling time, the time taken to physically sense the voltage on the pin. You must have a low impedance source to use shorter sampling. explained in the manual. Some processors can read the same pin more than once before stepping to the next pin, hence the delay read the ADC accuracy appnotes.
ADC_DataAlign_Right
I'd like to send multiple signals (4 inputs and outputs and 7 outputs) from my Laptop to a microcontroller. I'm thinking of using a USB to serial converter and multiplexing the data through the port. I'll need to write codes both in the laptop end and in the microcontroller to multiplex the data.
Eg:
Tx of microcontroller:
1.Temperature sensor ADC output->Laptop
2.Voltage sensor to laptop
3.Current Sensor to Laptop
4.Photodiode current to Laptop
So I need to write a program in the microcontroller to send the data in this order. How can I accomplish this? I was thinking of an infinite loop which sends the data with time delays in between.
At the Rx pin of Microcontroller,
Seven bit sequences. Each bit sequence will be used to set the duty cycle of a PWM generated by the microcontroller.
I also need the same multiplexing or demultiplexing arrangement in the matlab end. Here too, I'm thinking of allotting some virtual 'channels' at different instants of time. What kind of algorithm would I need?
In case you always send all the inputs/outputs at the same rate, you could simply pack them into 'packets', which always start with one or more bytes with a fixed value that form a 'packet header'. The only risk is that one of the bytes of the sensor data might have the same value as the start-byte at the moment you try to start receiving bytes and you are not yet synchronized. You can reduce this risk by making the header longer, or by choosing a start-byte that is illegal output for the sensors (typically OxFF or so).
The sending loop on the microcontroller is really easy (pseudocode):
while True:
measure_sensors()
serial.send(START_BYTE)
serial.send(temperature)
serial.send(voltage)
serial.send(current)
serial.send(photodiode)
end while
The receiving loop is a bit more tricky, since it needs to synchronize first:
while True:
data = serial.receive()
if data != START_BYTE:
print 'not synced'
continue #restart at top of while
end if
temperature = serial.receive()
voltage = serial.receive()
current = serial.receive()
photodiode = serial.receive()
do_stuff_with_measurements()
end while
This same scheme can be used for communication in both directions.