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Remember, this timer counts up.and you get the interrupt when it rolls over. To interrupt at a precise interval, you must compute the number of "counts" required for that interval and then subtract from 65535 to determine the timer load value. void setTimer(unsigned int intervalCounts) { TMR1ON = 0; TMR1 = 65535 - intervalCounts; TMR1ON = 1; } By turning the timer off and then setting the counts and restoring the timer, you can be sure that you will not get unexpected behavior if the timer value is written in an unexpected order. I will cover this topic in the next blog post on timers.

It has been a busy few weeks but finally I can sit down and write another installment to this series on embedded programming. Today's project will be another peripheral and a visualization tool for our development machines. We are going to learn about the UART. Then we are going to write enough code to attach the UART to a basic C printing library (printf) and finally we are going to use a program called processing to visualize data sent over the UART. This should be a fun adventure so let us get started. UART (USART?) The word UART is an acronym that stands for Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter. Some UART's have an additional feature so they are Universal Synchronous Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter or USART. We are not going to bother with the synchronous part so let us focus on the asynchronous part. The purpose of the UART is to send and receive data between our micro controller and some other device. Most frequently the UART is used to provide some form of user interface or simply debugging information live on a console. The UART signaling has special features that allow it to send data at an agreed upon rate (the baud rate) and an agreed upon data format (most typically 8 data bits, no parity and 1 stop bit). I am not going to go into detail on the UART signaling but you can easily learn about it by looking in chapter 36 of the PIC16F18446 datasheet. Specifically look at figure 36-3 if you are interested. UARTs are a device that transfer bytes of data (8-bits in a byte) one bit at a time across a single wire (one wire for transmit and one for receive) and a matching UART puts the bits back into a byte. Each bit is present on the wire for a brief but adjustable amount of time. Sending the data slowly is suitable for long noisy wires while sending the data fast is good for impatient engineers. A common baud rate for user interfaces is 9600 baud which is sends 1 letter every millisecond (0.001 seconds). Many years ago, before the internet, I had a 300 baud modem for communicating with other computers. When I read my e-mail the letters would arrive slightly slower than I could read. Later, after the internet was invented and we used modems to dial into the internet, I had a 56,600 baud modem so I could view web-pages and pictures more quickly. Today I use UARTS to send text data to my laptop and with the help of the processing program we can make a nice data viewer. Enough history... let us figure out the UART. Configuring the UART The UART is a peripheral with many options so we need to configure the UART for transmitting and receiving our data correctly. To setup the UART we shall turn to page 571 of our PIC16F18446 data sheet. The section labeled 36.1.1.7 describes the settings required to transmit asynchronous data. And now for some code. Here is the outline of our program. void init_uart(void) { } int getch(void) { } void putch(char c) { } void main(void) { init_uart(); while(1) { putch(getch()+1); } } This is a common pattern for designing a program. I start by writing my "main" function simply using simple functions to do the tricky bits. That way I can think about the problem and decide how each function needs to work. What sort of parameters each function will require and what sort of values each function will return. This program will be very simple. After initializing the UART to do its work, the program will read values from the UART, add 1 to each value and send it back out the UART. Since every letter in a computer is a simple value it will return the next letter in each series that I type. If I type 'A' it will return 'B' and so on. I like this test program for UART testing because it will demonstrate the UART is working and not simply shorting the receive pin to the transmit pin. Now that we have an idea for each function. Let us write them one a time. init_uart() This function will simply write all the needed values into the special function registers to activate the UART. To do that, we shall follow the checklist in the data sheet. We need to configure both the transmit and the receive function. Step 1 is to configure the baud rate. We shall use the BRG16 because that mode has the simplest baud rate formula. Of course, it is even easier when you use the supplied tables. I always figure that if you are not cheating, you are not trying so lets just find the 32MHz column in the SYNC=0, BRGH=0, BRG16 = 1 table. I like 115.2k baud because that makes the characters send much faster. So the value we need for the SPBRG is 16. Step 2 is to configure the pins. We shall configure TX and RX. To do that, we need the schematics. The key portion of the schematics is this bit. The confusing part is, the details of the TX and RX pin. If I had a $ for every time I got these backwards, I would have retired already. Fortunately the team at Microchip who drew these schematics were very careful to label the CDC TX connecting to the UART RX and the CDC RX connecting to the UART TX. They also labeled the UART TX as RB4 and UART RX as RB6. This looks pretty simple. Now we need to steer these signals to the correct pins via the PPS peripheral. NOTE: The PPS stands for Peripheral Pin Select. This feature allows the peripherals to be steered to almost any I/O pin on the device. This makes laying out your printed circuit boards MUCH easier as you can move the signals around to make all the connections straight through. You can also steer signals to more than one output pin enabling debugging by steering signals to your LED's or a test point. After steering the functions to the correct pins, it is time to clear the ANSEL for RB6 (making the pin digital) and clear TRIS for RB4 (making the pin an output). The rest of the initialization steps involve putting the UART in the correct mode. Let us see the code. void init_uart(void) { // STEP 1 - Set the Baud Rate BAUD1CONbits.BRG16 = 1; TX1STAbits.BRGH = 0; SPBRG = 16; // STEP 2 - Configure the PPS // PPS unlock sequence // this should be in assembly because the hardware counts the instruction cycles // and will not unlock unless it is exactly right. The C language cannot promise to // make the instruction cycles exactly what is below. asm("banksel PPSLOCK"); asm("movlw 0x55"); asm("movwf PPSLOCK"); asm("movlw 0xAA"); asm("movwf PPSLOCK"); asm("bcf PPSLOCK,0"); RX1PPSbits.PORT = 1; RX1PPSbits.PIN = 6; RB4PPS = 0x0F; // Step 2.5 - Configure the pin direction and digital mode ANSELBbits.ANSB6 = 0; TRISBbits.TRISB4 = 0; // Step 3 TX1STAbits.SYNC = 0; RC1STAbits.SPEN = 1; // Step 4 TX1STAbits.TX9 = 0; // Step 5 - No needed // Step 1 from RX section (36.1.2.1) RC1STAbits.CREN = 1; // Step 6 TX1STAbits.TXEN = 1; // Step 7 - 9 are not needed because we are not using interrupts // Step 10 is in the putchar step. } To send a character we simply need to wait for room in the transmitter and then add another character. void putch(char c) { while(!TX1IF); // sit here until there is room to send a byte TX1REG = c; } And to receive a character we can just wait until a character is present and retrieve it. int getch(void) { while(!RC1IF); // sit here until there is a byte in the receiver return RC1REG; } And that completes our program. Here is the test run. Every time I typed a letter or number, the following character is echoed. Typing a few characters is interesting and all but I did promise graphing. We shall make a simple program that will stream a series of numbers one number per row. Then we will introduce processing to convert this stream into a graph. The easiest way to produce a stream of numbers is to use printf. This function will produce a formatted line of text and insert the value of variables where you want them. The syntax is as follows: value = 5; printf("This is a message with a value %d\n",value); To get access to printf you must do two things. 1) You must include the correct header file. So add the following line near the top of your program. (by the xc.h line) #include <stdio.h> 2) You must provide a function named putch that will output a character. We just did that. So here is our printing program. #include <stdio.h> #include <math.h> /// Lots of stuff we already did void main(void) { double theta = 0; init_uart(); while(1) { printf("%f\r\n",sin(theta)); theta += 0.01; if(theta >= 2 * 3.1416) theta = 0; } } Pictures or it didn't happen. And now for processing. Go to http://www.processing.org and download a suitable version for your PC. Attached is a processing sketch that will graph whatever appears in the serial port from the PIC16. And here is a picture of it working. I hope you found this exercise interesting. As always post your questions & comments below. Quite a lot was covered in this session and your questions will guide our future work. Good Luck exercise_5a.zip exercise_5.zip graph_data.pde

A colleague of mine recommended this little book to me sometime last year. I have been referring to it so often now that I think we should add this to our reading list for embedded software engineers. The book is called "Don't make me think", by Steve Krug.The one I linked below is the "Revisited" version, which is the updated version. This book explains the essense of good user interface design, but why would I recommend this to embedded software engineers? After all embedded devices seldom have rich graphical GUI's and this book seems to be about building websites? It turns out that all the principles that makes a website easy to read, that makes for an awesome website in other words, apply almost verbatim to writing readable/maintainable code! You see code is written for humans to read and maintain, not for machines (machines prefer to read assembly or machine code in binary after all!). The principles explained in this book, when applied to your software will make it a pleasure to read, and effortless to maintain, because it will clearly communicate it's message without the unnecessary clutter and noise that we usually find in source code. You will learn that people who are maintaining and extending your code will not be reasoning as much as they will be satisficing (yes that is a real word !). This forms the basis of what Bob Martin calls "Viscosity" in your code. (read about it in his excellent paper entitled Design Principles and Design Patterns. The idea of Viscosity is that developers will satisfice when maintaining or extending the code, which results in the easiest way to do things being followed most often, so if the easiest thing is the correct thing the code will not rot over time, on the other hand if doing the "right" thing is hard people will bypass the design with ugly hacks and the code will become a tangled mess fairly quickly. But I digress, this book will help you understand the underlying reasons for this and a host of other problems. This also made me think of some excellent videos I keep on sending to people, this excellent talk by Chandler Carruth which explains that, just like Krug explains in this little book, programmers do not actually read code, they scan it, which is why consistency of form is so important (coding standards). Also this great talk by Kevlin Henney which explains concepts like signal to noise ratio and other details about style in your code (including how to write code with formatting which is refactoring immune - hint you should not be using tabs - because of course only a moron would use tabs) Remember, your code is the user interface to your program for maintainers of the code who it was written for in the first place. Let's make sure they understand what the hell it is you were doing before they break your code! For the lazy - here is an Amazon share link to the book, click it, buy it right now! https://amzn.to/2ZEoO4O