Alright, so I had what I thought was a relatively mundane problem: I wanted to send data over IR with a PIC I'm using (specifically, a PIC12LF1572). Should be simple, right? Turns out it's actually a bit of a pain to do in an efficient way, and hopefully it's common enough that my write-up here will be useful to someone trying to do something similar. I certainly looked pretty hard for a solution to this online and didn't come up with anything useful.
This write-up will assume some basic familiarity with microcontrollers (PICs especially) and so I'm not going to spend any time going over the basics like PWM/interrupts/etc.
I'm also not going to go into detail about what my overall project here is right now, instead I'll just focus on this specific solution because I believe it's deserving of it's own post. For now we'll just say I'm working on a generic IR transceiver.
So, why's this an interesting problem? Well, generally when sending data over IR you really want to avoid having all the environmental garbage clutter up your signal (sunlight, a variety of household lights, etc all give off a ton of IR). This is accomplished by filtering out any frequencies that aren't specifically what your receiver accepts, i.e. with a band-pass filter. Because your IR signal has to be sent at this frequency, you actually need to modulate your data with it. For example, if your original data signal looks something like this:
Original data
Then in order to be read by the photodetector your modulated output needs to look something like the blue plotted here:
Original data with modulated signal
So, how do we generate the modulated signal? The most obvious answer would be using an AND logic gate, like so:
Combined signals with AND gate
This is actually a perfectly fine solution in many cases, but there are a couple of major drawbacks which meant that there was no way I could use it in my design. The AND gate adds a whole extra unnecessary component, which drives up the cost of your project (not a big deal if you're just making one, but I'm making 50-100 of these). The other problem is that it requires the use of an additional microcontroller pin (or external PWM source), and considering that I was already making use of all of the output pins on my 8-pin PIC, there simply wasn't an extra pin I could use.
What's the alternative solution? Use the DAC to modulate the data. Seriously. I'll walk you through the process I used to figure this out, and provide the code I used in case you'd like to implement it yourself.
I wanted a decent amount of range with my transmitter, so instead of driving my IR LED at 25mA (the max an I/O pin can safely handle), I decided to drive it with a simple BJT (2n3904). Obviously I wanted the drive signal to be the TX pin of the PIC, so I threw together a quick schematic:
You can see the IR LED hooked up to the BJT's collector, and the base is driven with the PIC's primary TX pin (pin 7), with a series resistor to limit current.
I knew that the photodetector I'm using has a band-pass filter that harshly attenuates signals outside of 38KHz, which means that I didn't have an option other than to modulate my data at 38KHz. As seems to be a common trend with my microcontroller projects, I simply decided "Oh, I'll do something clever in software later." With that, I went ahead and placed an order for a few prototype boards without looking all that closely at the PIC's datasheet.
With the boards on the way, I started cracking on the firmware. To begin with I had some vague notion that I'd write data out using the USART while simultaneously toggling the TX pin between input/output at 38KHz. Well, my boards came in and quickly after soldering one together and checking the data on a scope, I discovered that my original plan wasn't going to work. The USART was writing data out just fine, but unfortunately it just wasn't being modulated at all. The module just overwrites the pin state to output if you set the TRISA register declaring it an input.
Following a couple of days of painful troubleshooting, trying alternative methods, and just generally not getting anything to work, I noticed this unassuming chart right here:
(Taken straight from the datasheet)
Basically, functions higher on the list are able to dominate the state of the associated pin. Notice how pin RA0 (the main TX pin) has 3 functions with a higher priority than the TX function? Well, ICSPDAT is just used for programming so it's not helpful in this case. However, CWG1B (an output of the complimentary waveform generator) and the DAC (DAC1OUT) are both listed as higher priority. That means that if the CWG or the DAC to outputs to the pin while TX is writing to the output buffer, the TX is going to get overridden.
Okay, so that's one piece of the problem, the other one is how to convince the CWG or the DAC to take control of the pin at exactly 38KHz. The CWG is basically able to PWM, so you'd think it'd be the best choice in this case - it turns out that wasn't super helpful because I didn't actually want to drive the pin high then low, I just wanted to change its state between driven and undriven by a specific peripheral. Accordingly it didn't really matter whether I used the CWG or the DAC, so naturally I went with the DAC for extra hilarity (seriously, how can you resist being able to write obtuse comments like "// Enable DAC to send data over serial"?) I used Timer1 to hit overflow at about 38KHz*2 = 76KHz, triggering an interrupt which toggles the output state of the DAC (which defaults to writing 0V). When the DAC's output is on, it drives the TX pin at 0V, and when the output is disabled the TX is allowed to regain control of the pin state. I also made sure to use a slow baud rate (4545) in order to allow enough 38KHz pulses to sufficiently modulate the signal.
Without further ado, the code:
void Setup(void)
{
OSCCON = 0b01111010; //16MHz internal clock
TRISAbits.TRISA0 = 0; // Set RA0 as output
}
void Send_Packet(uint8_t data)
{
DACCON0bits.DACEN = 1; // Enable DAC to send data over serial
Modulate_Serial();
SPBRGL = 54; // Baud rate is 4545
TXSTAbits.SYNC = 0; // Asynchronous mode
RCSTAbits.SPEN = 1; // Enable EUSART
BAUDCONbits.SCKP = 1; // Inverted mode (idle low)
TXSTAbits.TXEN = 1; // Enable transmitter
TXREG = data;
while(!TXSTAbits.TRMT); // Wait for USART to send all data
Disable_Modulation();
TRISAbits.TRISA0 = 0; // Allow RA0 to drive low
DACCON0bits.DACEN = 0;
}
void Modulate_Serial(void){
INTCONbits.GIE = 1; // Enable interrupts
INTCONbits.PEIE = 1; // Enable peripheral interrupts
PIE1bits.TMR1IE = 1; // Enable Timer1 overflow interrupt
T1CONbits.nT1SYNC = 1; // Don't synchronize external clock input
T1CONbits.TMR1ON = 1; // Turn on timer
TMR1 = 65484; // Initialize TMR1 value for desired frequency
}
void Disable_Modulation(void){
INTCONbits.GIE = 0;
T1CONbits.TMR1ON = 0;
}
// Interrupts
void interrupt High_Priority_Interrupt(){
if(PIR1bits.TMR1IF == 1) // TMR1 register overflowed
{
DACCON0bits.DACEN ^= 1; // Use DAC to generate 38KHz carrier wave
TMR1 += 65484;
PIR1bits.TMR1IF = 0; // Clear the interupt flag
}
}
That's pretty much it! All you'd need to do to use this (in MPLAB X with XC8 as your compiler) is add a header file with prototypes for those functions.
He's the final scope shot showing off the modulated waveform, thanks to the DAC:
Yay! Everything works the way it's supposed to.
Over all it was an exciting few days coming up with this somewhat disgusting (but mostly hilarious) hack, and I figured it was actually worth posting about since someone might find it useful. Let me know if you have any questions!
I was looking for a new electronics project to work on, and found some inspiration in the skydiving world. While you're in freefall, it's absolutely critical to know what altitude you're at, so you can know when to safely pull your parachute. Skydivers wear something along the lines of this so they can keep track of altitude, but another useful indicator is what's called an "audible altimeter", an electronic device that's placed in your helmet and sends out a series of warning beeps at pre-programmed altitudes. I was looking into purchasing an audible altimeter for myself, and found that they're all super expensive (over $200), which seemed pretty ridiculous to me considering how simple they are. I decided it would be a fun project to try and make my own since I thought I could produce one for cheaper, and learn a lot in the process.
It's definitely an interesting project because everything has to be made as small and low-power as possible, in order to have it be completely portable and so that you don't have to constantly worry about the battery dying. I decided to go with a rechargeable lithium polymer battery (specifically this one) since they have great energy density and charge rates. I found a fantastic chip which is built to charge a single cell LiPo at up to half an amp from a 5V source, which is great for USB charging. I'd also gotten some experience soldering QFN (leadless) surface mount parts over the summer, and I thought it'd be neat to design a board with these to make it as small as possible.
I wanted to branch out in microcontroller selection and pick a new architecture that I could learn about. I ended up going with an STM32F050 because it's quite powerful for how much it costs, and it's a good match for the features I need.
Other than that, I picked:
a fast barometer (many of them could only be read as fast as once a second, but this one gives up to 200 readings per second) so that I can get an accurate reading of pressure to calculate altitude from.
a 3.3V buck converter, because the LiPo battery outputs anywhere from around 3.6 to 4.2 volts, and everything runs on 3.3V. The buck converter isn't completely necessary because it could be replaced with a linear regulator, but I figured it was worth it to pay a few cents more for something like 20% longer battery life due to the extra efficiency.
a bunch of 0603 (metric 1608) passive resistors, capacitors, and LEDs, as well as a few miscellaneous parts like buttons, an inductor, etc.
I started out with a quick block diagram of how I wanted to hook everything up:
I forgot to label Vdd from the STM and the BMP180, but they're going to the 3.3V buck output, not the battery voltage.
I basically sat down for a day or two and CADed all of the part packages using Eagle, and put together a schematic that pretty closely follows the block diagram above, plus a bunch of passives, buttons, and a couple other things.
Unfortunately I was in one of those ultra-focused "make this project without thinking about anything else" states while putting this together, so I forgot to take screenshots showing the process.
One interesting challenge was that I wanted the whole board to be completely powered off while not in use, turn on when a button is pressed, and then be able to turn off when the same button is pressed again. Since I'm only using on/off tactile buttons, I had to get a little creative in order to build this behavior. Basically the buck converter's enable pin (EN) is hooked up to a microcontroller output, so the microcontroller can drive it low to turn off power to everything (including the micro itself). The power button is also hooked up to EN, so that when the board is off and you press the power button, the buck converter turns on, turning on power to the whole board. The micro then has to immediately hold EN high in order for the buck to stay on when you release the button. So far so good, right? The one problem is that the micro has to have a way of knowing when you hit the power button a second time, so that it knows when to turn off the buck and power down. I ended up coming up with a resistor divider pulls a pin on the micro low whenever the micro is driving EN, and pulls the pin high when the button is driving EN, allowing the micro to read the state of that pin to decide if it should power off.
With the schematic out of the way, it was time to lay out/route the board! I wanted all the parts to be on one side so that I could put a battery flush on the other. Here's what I was looking at after placing components:
You can't tell from the picture, but the battery connector (bottom right) is actually on the underside of the board to make it easy to plug the battery into. The yellow lines are "airwires", or connections that haven't yet been physically made. The whole board comes in pretty small at just under 2" by 1", which I'm pretty happy with.
Routing time! This is one of my favorite parts of making boards, it always creates some interesting challenges, especially with smaller boards. Once again, I was in in-the-zone-mode, so I forgot to take pictures of the process.
Looking back I'm a little unhappy with what I consider slightly sloppy routing, all those vias (connections from one side to the other) in the center look pretty messy. Oh well, for revision 1, as long as it works right?
I decided to go with Seeed Studio to get the board fabricated, for smaller boards like this they have an awesome deal of 10 boards for $10, not counting shipping. After placing the order, it was time for the few weeks of eager anticipation that I've come to know over the last year or two since I started making boards.
Of course, it's always worth it when you get a package in the mail and suddenly it feels like Christmas. Here's the top and bottom, with a quarter for scale:
Sorry for the picture quality, maybe one of these days I'll stop spending all my money on skydiving/engineering projects and actually buy a camera instead of using my phone.
Of course as soon as I got these I put everything else aside and rushed to populate one of these with parts, so here's a picture taken a few hours later with everything soldered on:
From there I moved on to trying to turn on the board, and immediately starting having a few problems with the buck converter that it took me a while to get to the bottom of. After decreasing the bypass capacitance on the VCC line I was able to get it to boot up, which allowed me to start programming the microcontroller. Time to learn how the STM32F050 works! Fortunately there's a lot of example code and guides around which make it pretty easy to get things going. I won't go into to much detail about how the code works, I don't think it's useful to paste a bunch of lines of initialization/etc here, so instead I'll describe what I generally did. I started out writing a basic program which holds the buck's EN pin high, turns on the yellow LED, and turns on the blue LED whenever the "ZERO" button is pressed. After getting that all working, I noticed some weird behavior where the board would turn off seemingly randomly. I eventually realized that putting my finger on the top of the board was what was causing it to turn off, most specifically whenever I touched the buck converter. Hmm. It turns out that I had used a large resistor in my voltage divider (the one described above) which caused the EN pin on the buck to be sort of floating, and the transient produced by touching it with your finger was enough to bounce it low, causing the whole board to turn off. Once I knew about this I actually elected not to patch in a bypass capacitor on EN (which would fix the issue), because while debugging I actually prefer the option to have a quick "hard off" available (where the off button is basically touching the EN on the buck).
From there I moved on to figuring out how PWM works on these chips and wrote a function to drive the piezo at different frequencies (e.g. a low frequency/relatively quiet 'boop' when it boots up). I continued to fiddle with it for a week or two, then more or less set the board aside for a while to focus on schoolwork. This semester I have a bit more free time, so I picked the board back up a few weeks ago and continued to work on the code for it. I²C, the communication protocol that the barometer uses, was particularly difficult to get working. I learned that I should have included an extra header for debugging I²C because I had to measure everything by jamming scope probes into the tiny vias on the I²C signal lines. After a few days of working on it, though, I finally got the two chips successfully talking and was able to get a pressure reading out of the barometer.
I took a snapshot of the communication between the microcontroller and the pressure sensor with an oscilloscope:
The other board you can see is ST's awesome Discovery board, which runs for $10 and has an STM32F1 that you can program, as well as a built-in ST programmer which I'm using here to program my board. On the scope, you can see that the first eight data bits (blue) write out 11101110 where they coincide with the clock pulses (yellow). Converted to hex, this is 0xEE, which is the 'write to' address of the barometer, meaning that I'm telling it I'm about to write data to it. The next clock pulse after this is the barometer pulling the data line low, which is an I²C 'ACK', or acknowledgement that it received the previous byte. After that, you can read 11110110, or 0xF6, which is the micro telling the sensor which address it wants to read from (in this case, the address where the last pressure reading is stored). Not currently shown on the scope, the altimeter then sends out its 'uncompensated' pressure reading, which the micro uses (along with a variety of factory calibration parameters previously read from the barometer's memory over I²C) along with a temperature to calculate the 'true' pressure, and then calculates altitude from the pressure.
I had been debugging everything from my laptop, and using debug mode to keep track of variables, which I decided wasn't a great solution for actually tracking how the measured altitude changed as I moved around. I ordered a cheap LCD from ebay and threw it on a breadboard with an Arduino to try and get a portable display which would read out the altitude difference from the zero point in real time, allowing me to run up and down tall buildings and see how well it tracks changes. Because of the way the I²C protocol works, you're able to add new devices to your communication lines whenever you want, which allowed me to simply add the Arduino onto the existing I²C line in order to talk to it. Unfortunately this required somewhat sketchily soldering thin wires onto very small pads on the pull-up resistors on my board, but once I got them there I coated them with hot glue to keep them in place.
Unfortunately, while for some reason the Arduino reads its address correctly (sends an ACK) and does appear to read some of the data sent to it, I've got a bug somewhere because somehow it's not actually reading the data I'm sending. It'll probably take another few days of poking at the Arduino to get it to read data in properly, but my board itself seems to be working as I want it to, for the most part. Pretty close to having it actually be usable for skydiving! I'll probably 3D print a case for it as well.
That's the current state of my altimeter board, I've also got a new project that I'm really excited about (and just ordered boards for!) which I'll write up in the next post.
Hey! It's been a while. I'll go ahead and explain where I've been, and then talk about some stuff I've been working on recently. I stopped posting before the start of last summer, where I got to intern at a really cool company called Freefly, who primarily make giant camera-hauling multirotors for professional cinema, as well as more recently a sweet 3-axis handheld camera stabilizer. They're based in my hometown, Seattle, and staying there was pretty awesome because I got to rock climb every weekday evening, and then head to the dropzone and skydive every weekend! Unfortunately this left me without a lot of time for personal projects, but I did manage to pick up my skydiving license towards the start of the summer, and I'm up to 54 jumps now. Here's a pretty cool picture my friend Andrew from the MIT Skydiving Club took of me this fall:
I also have a video from early in the summer, just after I got my license. I'm wearing all black with a black helmet and a navy blue parachute with red highlights:
Anyway, enough about that. Let's move on to the really interesting stuff - x86 assembly! Last semester I took a pretty cool class called Intro to Robotics, in which we were provided with 3D printed, jointed legs, and had to build a driven exoskeleton to allow them to walk on a treadmill. I was primarily in charge of my team's programming and electronics (it was a MechE class so I had the most experience in these), and I was able to write some functional code and get it to walk:
The robot uses a gyro inside the hip to determine the hip angle, and has a control loop which speeds up the walk cycle as the hip tilts forwards, allowing it to match the speed of the treadmill. I also got to witness a bit of control system magic when the robot walked up on the front piece of the treadmill (stepping off of the belt entirely), paused for a second, and then started walking backwards back down onto the treadmill. Since walking too far forward had caused the hip to tilt backward, it actually slowed down the walking cycle until it reversed it entirely. Unfortunately this wasn't captured on video, but it was a pretty magical moment!
Despite this, I wasn't too proud of my code because to me it felt pretty hacked together. I decided I really wanted to make an effort to get better at programming - of course step one was to immediately add a linux (Ubuntu) install to my laptop, and after working on a few Python projects I decided I wanted to try and learn some assembly language. Despite having spent a fair amount of time with various microcontrollers, everything I've written for them has been in C, so I didn't have any experience writing assembly until now. I thought that it would be fun to write something that runs on my laptop, so I installed nasm, a common assembler, and started reading online tutorials. I'll try to keep this post limited to explaining what I've done, rather than making it an assembly tutorial on its own, but I'll link you a few of the tutorials/pages I found useful if you're interested in really learning this stuff on your own:
Unfortunately all of those tutorials are for 32-bit linux, and since I wanted to write for my 64-bit machine I had to use different registers than the ones in their examples, as well as having entirely different system calls.
First let's go over what I wrote, and then I'll explain it a bit. I started out writing a program that takes in a command line argument (when you run a program from the command line you can give it one or more 'arguments', which are just strings that get pushed to the stack) and then prints it back out. This really isn't useful to me (more useful versions of this already exist, like echo), but it's a good place to start learning. Here's the behavior:
The battery monitor at the bottom [charge state, charge%, remaining time] is one of the Python projects I mentioned earlier
You'll see me calling the program to run it: ./args_old, and then giving it a single string: "this is a sample string!" as a command line argument. The backslashes are just escapes for the spaces and exclamation mark, so they become part of the string instead of splitting the text into separate arguments. As you can see, running it will just print the string I gave back through standard output.
Now, let's take a look under the hood:
section .text
global _start
_start:
pop rax ; get number of args
pop rbx ; get program name
cmp rax,2
jne _bad; if there isn't just 1 arg, go to _bad
pop rcx ; first argument
call _length_entry
_output:
mov rax,1
mov rdi,1
mov rsi,rcx
mov rdx,[strLen] ; length of str into rdx
_length_test:
cmp byte [rcx],0
jne _length
sub rcx,[strLen]
ret ; if null byte, ret
section .data
strLen dq 0 ; reserve some space for length
ten db 10 ; -_-
feelbad db 'Your args are bad and you should feel bad.',10
feelLen equ $-feelbad
Woo, assembly! 60+ lines just to print something back at you. In order to make a system call to write, you have to give it both a string and the length of the string, so it knows where to stop. Because of this, I had to write a routine that counts the length of the argument, conveniently named _length. Basically it uses the strLen as a counter, counting characters in the string until it hits a null byte (0), meaning there are no more characters and it's hit the end of the string. The registerrcx holds a pointer to the argument string from the start. It gets shifted forward in each loop of _length to always point to the next character until finding the null byte, then it gets subtracted by strLen so that it points back to the beginning of the string. Also, if you don't have exactly one argument, it'll jump to the label _bad which prints an error message. Finally, the _output routine sets registers to make a system write call, puts the string pointer into the rsi register which is where the system looks for the string to write, and similarly puts strLen into rdx. Then syscall actually tells the kernel to run the instruction.
Once I got that working, I decided to make it a bit more interesting. How about making it take in two arguments, both a number %n and a string, and then printing the string %n times?
Because arguments are always pushed to your program as strings, this means that something like "3523" is still a string, so I had to write a routine to convert a string into an integer. Here's the full code for the new version (also a pastebin):
section .text global _start
_start: pop rax ; get number of args pop rbx ; get program name cmp rax,3 ; make sure there are 2 arguments (+1 for program name) jne _bad ; if not, jump to error message pop rdx ; first argument pop rcx ; second argument
_length_entry: mov qword [strLen],0 ; zero string length jmp _length_test
_length: inc qword [strLen] ; increment string length inc rcx ; string pointer to next character
_length_test: cmp byte [rcx],0 ; check if null character jne _length sub rcx,[strLen] ; set rcx back to beginning of string ret ; if null byte, ret
_atoi_entry: xor r9,r9 ; zero accumulator mov [asciinum],rdx ; write string pointer to [asciinum]
_atoi: xor rax,rax ; set rax to 0 mov r10,[asciinum] ; pointer to asciinum in r10 mov al,[r10] ; first byte of string into first byte of al cmp al,0 ; make sure we haven't hit end of string je _atoi_exit
lea r11,[r9*8] lea r9,[r11+r9*2] ; multiply r9 by 10
sub al,48 ; ascii -> digits cmp al,9 ; make sure they're numbers 0-9 ja _bad
add r9,rax ; incriment accumulator inc qword [asciinum] ; shift pointer to string up by 1 (next character)
jmp _atoi
_atoi_exit: mov [asciiInt],r9 ; write accumulator to asciiInt ret
_text_entry: xor r12,r12 ; zero a counter jmp _text_mult_cmp
_text_mult: ; text_mult is effectively a while loop that prints our ; string r9 times, since r9 is our accumulator from before call _output inc r12
_text_mult_cmp: cmp r12,r9 je _exit jmp _text_mult
section .data stra dq 0 ; reserve space for string pointer strLen dq 0 ; reserve some space for length asciinum dq 0 asciiInt dq 0 ten db 10 ; sigh. set the value of ten to be 10 feelbad db 'Your args are bad and you should feel bad. Proper syntax: args <int> <str>' feelLen equ $-feelbad ; set length of feelbad to feelLen
You can see the label _atoi which converts a string to an integer. It's similar to _length, except each time it moves to a new character, it multiplies the whole thing by 10. This makes sense if you think about how a base-10 system works, if you type in a single digit - say, 4 - then it reads the first character, adds it to the accumulator register r9, finds that the next character is a null byte, and writes 4 to asciiInt. If you give it two digits - how about 24 - then it reads the first character, adds it to the accumulator (now the accumulator = 2), finds the next character isn't a null byte, multiplies the accumulator by 10 so the accumulator = 20, reads in the next character (4), and adds it to the accumulator to get a value of 24. The algorithm works the same way as you continue increasing the length of the number you give it. My program also checks each character with cmp al,9 then ja _bad which makes sure it's 0-9 instead of some other ascii character, and if not then it goes to the _bad routine to print an error message.
Here's a quick demo of the error message:
It also still prints the error message if the number of arguments given isn't exactly 2.
That's pretty much it!
Once you write assembly code like my example above, you need to assemble it into machine code, which I do with nasm -f elf64 args.asm. This produces an object file (args.o) which is just raw machine language. There's also a program called objdump which can print out the object file and the associated instructions if you do something like objdump -d args.o, the output of which can be found here on pastebin (check it out, it's cool!). After making the object file, I then use the linker ld to convert it into an executable, for example ld -s -o args args.o which produces an executable file called args. To debug, there's a great program called gdb which allows you to step through your code one instruction at a time, and check all the register values at each step.
Unfortunately the speed of my program is pretty much limited by the overhead of the system write calls, but I still got it to write a 10 character line 10,000,000 times (into /dev/null which is a place to dump unwanted text) in about 6 seconds.
I may not have made any explicitly useful programs, but I definitely learned a lot about how my computer works by learning some assembly. In the future if I need to write a function to do some really fast math, I could definitely see myself implementing it in assembly then calling it every time I need it. I definitely recommend doing this kind of thing on your own, it's fun!
In addition to programming, I've also been doing a fair amount of electronics work recently. Next post will be a write-up of a new board I've put together!
