In the previous parts of this series the infrared-to-Android gateway based on the RFDuino hardware and an improved version of the hardware
were presented. The improved hardware offered quite reliable IR code
recognition even when the BLE connection was in operation. Trouble with
that implementation was the polling nature of the code; even though the
IR reader support hardware is capable of raising an interrupt when a new
time measurement is available, the code did not handle that interrupt,
instead it polled the interrupt signal.
Click here for the updated gateway code. Click here for the (unchanged) Android application serving the gateway.
The reason I did not implement proper interrupt handling was the I2C library (called "Wire") coming with the RFDuino. Even though the nRF51822 (on which the RFDuino is based) is able to handle its I2C interface (called TWI, two-wire interface) by means of interrupts, it was not implemented in the "Wire" library. When the MCP23008 GPIO port extender raised an interrupt, the MCU was expected to read the MCP23008's capture register by means of an I2C transaction. As the "Wire" library was polling-based, this transaction held back the GPIO-handling interrupt for too long time, freezing the system.
The solution was transforming the "Wire" library into interrupt-based implementation. Now as my goal was a limited functionality (reading one register of an I2C periphery) I did not do it properly. I moved the entire "Wire" library into the application project (see it under the "lib" directory), renamed it to "Wire2" and introduced a couple of new methods, more importantly sendReceiveInt (in lib/Wire2.cpp). This method initiates the write transaction of a data array followed by a read transaction of another data array over I2C, all handled by TWI interrupts. This means that sendReceiveInt returns immediately and the actual data transfer happens in the background. This new method is invoked in the GPIO interrupt handler (GPIOTE_Interrupt in sketch/irblegw3.ino) but this time the GPIO interrupt handler completes very quickly as its job is only to initiate the TWI transaction handler. When the TWI transaction is finished, the TWI interrupt handler invokes the onReceive callback that ends in the application code (twi_complete in sketch/irblegw3.ino).
The most important outcome of this - quite significant - change is that the MCU does not spend its time spinning on the GPIO port reading loop. Instead, it waits for interrupts in ultra-low power mode (sketch/irblegw3.ino, IRrecvRFDuinoPCI::GetResults method, RFduino_ULPDelay invocation) which is important if the infrared-to-Android gateway is powered by a battery. As you may have guessed, my goal is not to fiddle with IR remote controllers, I intend to build a short-range network comprising of infrared, BLE and cellular links and the infrared-to-BLE gateway was just one step.
Click here for the updated gateway code. Click here for the (unchanged) Android application serving the gateway.
The reason I did not implement proper interrupt handling was the I2C library (called "Wire") coming with the RFDuino. Even though the nRF51822 (on which the RFDuino is based) is able to handle its I2C interface (called TWI, two-wire interface) by means of interrupts, it was not implemented in the "Wire" library. When the MCP23008 GPIO port extender raised an interrupt, the MCU was expected to read the MCP23008's capture register by means of an I2C transaction. As the "Wire" library was polling-based, this transaction held back the GPIO-handling interrupt for too long time, freezing the system.
The solution was transforming the "Wire" library into interrupt-based implementation. Now as my goal was a limited functionality (reading one register of an I2C periphery) I did not do it properly. I moved the entire "Wire" library into the application project (see it under the "lib" directory), renamed it to "Wire2" and introduced a couple of new methods, more importantly sendReceiveInt (in lib/Wire2.cpp). This method initiates the write transaction of a data array followed by a read transaction of another data array over I2C, all handled by TWI interrupts. This means that sendReceiveInt returns immediately and the actual data transfer happens in the background. This new method is invoked in the GPIO interrupt handler (GPIOTE_Interrupt in sketch/irblegw3.ino) but this time the GPIO interrupt handler completes very quickly as its job is only to initiate the TWI transaction handler. When the TWI transaction is finished, the TWI interrupt handler invokes the onReceive callback that ends in the application code (twi_complete in sketch/irblegw3.ino).
The most important outcome of this - quite significant - change is that the MCU does not spend its time spinning on the GPIO port reading loop. Instead, it waits for interrupts in ultra-low power mode (sketch/irblegw3.ino, IRrecvRFDuinoPCI::GetResults method, RFduino_ULPDelay invocation) which is important if the infrared-to-Android gateway is powered by a battery. As you may have guessed, my goal is not to fiddle with IR remote controllers, I intend to build a short-range network comprising of infrared, BLE and cellular links and the infrared-to-BLE gateway was just one step.
2 comments:
Very Nice information shared about android. Keep sharing tutorials. This blog post is really helpful.
Excellent and very cool idea and the subject at the top of magnificence and I am happy to this post..Interesting post! Thanks for writing it.What's wrong with this kind of post exactly? It follows your previous guideline for post length as well as clarity.
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