20ch Firmware Improvements

Published on 2017-01-20 in Servo Breakout for WeMos D1 Mini.

Today I spent several hours working on the firmware – adding the address selection support and making the whole thing much robust.

The first thing I added, was to modify place where the servo events are updated. Until now, they were updated immediately after the I2C transaction finished – as soon as we had the servo pulses. But that meant that if you are unlucky, it could happen while the timer interrupt fires, and the data seen by the interrupt would be inconsistent. We can’t switch off the interrupts while updating the events, because it takes very long time, and our timings would be completely off then. So what can be done? Well, all the events typically happen in the first 2ms of the cycle. We have 18ms left to update the events (that’s also why the glitch wasn’t so easily visible). So now, when the I2C transaction finishes, a flag is set signalling that an update is needed. Then, while waiting for more I2C data, the loop checks that flag and whether the last event in the cycle has been already processed. As soon as the last even is processed (which we can recognize by the fact that it has delay of 0xffff), we update the events and clear the flag. Sounds easy, but it took me some hours to get right.

Unfortunately, that didn’t eliminate all the glitches. The second problem happens when you have two events very close to each other – so close, that processing of the first one finishes after the second one’s scheduled time. You could expect the second event to be a bit late then, but it’s actually much worse – since the interrupts fire on equality, and not whenever the counter overflows the trigger, the interrupt for the second event is skipped entirely and never fires – the pin is only updated in the next event, or never, if that event was the last one. Ouch. I spent some time optimizing the interrupt routine and moving stuff in it to make it a bit more robust, but it’s never processed instantly, and the problem remains. In the end, I’m just looking for events that happen too soon after the previous one, and when that happens, merge them with that previous event. It introduces a few microseconds of a glitch, but that’s better than the alternative.

For the address selection, I had to use the analog-only pins of the ATmegaXX8. I was already a bit tired when I started on it, so I stupidly copied the code from my Mechatronic Ears project, forgetting that it’s for an ATtiny85. And it mostly worked – the AVR chips are very similar, after all, especially when using the correct header files with the right macros – except that I masked wrong bits in the mux selection. It took me sever tries to track that down, but once I found it the fix was trivial.

The next bug is related to the internal pullups I’m enabling on the I2C lines. Turns out I had the masks for the PWM routines slightly wrong, and they were also toggling the pullups. The effects on the I2C transmission were… interesting, if not a bit nondeterministic. It helped that I got a really nice logic analyzer for Christmas, that also has an analog channel, and that I could see the voltage levels on the I2C lines acting weird, even when there was no data being transmitted. Fixing this while keeping the interrupt routines as fast as possible took several tries, but I managed to move all the operations into the event update routines in the end.

The last thing I added is sending a stop condition on the I2C bus whenever something unexpected happens on it. That lets me recover from errors in communication more easily.