On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 3:50 PM, Kirk <[email protected]> wrote:

> I have a scope on the SPI signals there is nothing I can see that is a
> problem.  The SPI hardware module is doing its job and clocking all the
> bits.
> It's recognizing the data ready, doing the SPI transfer, saving the data
> with time to spare. (99% of the time anyway)
>

I can tell you that the SPI modules, as I recall are only set to run at
16Mhz ? Something much lower than these modules max out at. I seem to
recall someone saying that these modules can easily run 50Mhz, but I can
not think of the source from which I read that.

>
> To clarify, it's not overrunning a bit in the SPI word.
> The problem is that the data ready bit comes at a steady 3200Hz and
> sometimes it just doesn't get back in time for the next data transfer.
> As far as I can tell no fault of the code I'm running.
>

Show us the code. You can't have anything we( who are programmers ) have
not seen already. But this way we( I ) can examine the code and tell if you
"we" see anything that can be a potential problem.


> The code is focused only on the tight loop that monitors the data ready
> bit and then uses the SPI to transfer the data.
> I assume there must be things going on in Linux like WiFi communications
> and Ethernet communications that interrupt my code.
>
> I'm using a somewhat older image.
> What image should I use to get started working with the PRU?
>
> Kirk
>

It sounds like you might be running a 3.8.x kernel ? But you can start with
any image. However, I might suggest you start off with the newest images.
As changes have been made to make it simpler to use either remoteproc, or
uio_pruss.

So what the PRU will net you is a tighter loop, that runs outside of linux.
So this means that your code can not be preempted by anything Linux. Pretty
much, and put very basically. It'll be like running your code on a bare
metal Cortex M3. NBut this Cortex M3 is special in that these do not have a
instruction pipeline. Which means that instructions typically take only one
cycle( 5ns ) There are multi cycle instructions, but you can do your best
to stay away from those as much as possible. *If* you need to. Initially
though, it seems like you'll have plenty of room, while still being able to
maintain your needed timing.

What I would recommend that you try first is upgrading your kernel, and
upgrade to an rt kernel to see if that helps any. 4.x kernels by themselves
already seem more responsive to me, but it is entirely possible all you'll
need is an rt kernel. I've yet to test SPI on an rt kernel myself, but what
I have done is parse 1Mbit worth of CANBUS data, in realtime, parse out,
and send out via websockets around 1,000 seperate fields per second. So . .
.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ apt-cache search linux-image |grep 4.4.*rt*

And then just pick one of the newer bone, or TI kernels. Then give your
code a whirl on that.

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