Rs232 software flow control - windows

I have a general question about Rs232 Software Flowcontrol (aka XOn/XOff)
The .Net implementation (and the nativ win32 api) bothe define a property called WriteTimeout / ReadTimeout, which is a time in ms after which a communication is considered to be overdue.
No my problem is this: If I send, lets say a 5 Byte string to the device I don't see any WriteTimeout, as expected. How is this implemented? Everything I find about Software flow control is that XOFF is to be set, when the recieve buffer is full; XOn when it is ready to recieve again.
But from the behavior I see, I would suspect, hat the device sends XON, after it has processed the 5-Byte information that I send, thus creating the information for windows to generate the corresponding events.
So when to send XON on a two-wire only RS232 implementation? Only if the buffer was full and to restart recieving; Or to signal, that we are "still ready" to receive after every chunk we processed?
How to implement?
Cheers & thx in advance!
Corelgott

Send an XON any time you are ready to receive data (your receive buffer is empty or nearly so). Send an XOFF any time you cannot accept more incoming data (your receive buffer is full or nearly so). The process is documented on the Wikipedia software flow control page.

Related

serial stops between mbed and processing

I want a solution right now...
The LPC1768 which is one of a mbed prototyping boards communicates with processing through Serial whose baud rate is 115200. However, as time passes, the serial communication stops.
As a situation, the LPC1768 sends sensor data with serial.putc() of the default serial library. On the other hand, processing receives the data with serial.read(). The processing code is the following:
if(serial.available()>1) { serial.read(); }
To explore the solution of this problem, I tired these things.
I checked serial.available() is 46 and used serial.clear() in processing, but mbed stopped and didn't send data. Because I thought the cause of this was an overflow of receiving buffer of processing.
I added serial.writable() and check the serial buffers for sending has space. If there are no space, I used the following codes and initialized the serial:
LPC_UART2->FCR |= 0x06;
serial.baud(115200);
, because I thought the cause of this was an overflow of sending buffer of mbed. However, they didn't work.
Please note that these codes work correctly and basically.
However, serial communication stops suddenly. What can I do anything else?
Best regards

How CSMA/CA works on XBee?

I'm trying to implement S-MAC protocol on waspmote xbee sensors and i know it has its own CSMA/CA. So first of all I need to understand the basic of xBee collision avoidance.
Two senders set up in api mode in libraries and both periodically sending single bytes to a common receiver. I reduce the delay and many changing in libabries to make collision and to see how algorithm works. But when i monitor data at the receiver all looks as expected at the receiver .. byte1, byte 2 .. byte1, byte2.
Do u have any idea how can i make collision?
Are you sniffing the 802.15.4 traffic? That's the only way you'd see a collision.
The XBee module buffers the data you want to send, using the host communication parameters (baud rate, API mode, etc.) and then sends it out over 802.15.4 at 250kbps. The module has all of the collision avoidance built in, and will retransmit as necessary to deliver your message. If it's unable to deliver after some number of transmission attempts, you'll get a Transmit Status frame indicating failure.
On the receiving end, it buffers the data and delivers it to the local host using local serial settings (baud rate and API mode).
If you're trying to implement S-MAC, you need a different radio processor where you have low-level control over the radio. The XBee module provides an application layer and handles the MAC layer itself.

Linux Driver and API architecture for a data acquisition device

We're trying to write a driver/API for a custom data acquisition device, which captures several "channels" of data. For the sake of discussion, let's assume this is a several-channel video capture device. The device is connected to the system via an 8xPCIe Gen-1 link, which has a theoretical throughput of 16Gbps. Our actual data rate will be around 2.8Gbps (~350MB/sec).
Because of the data rate requirement, we think we have to be careful about the driver/API architecture. We've already implemented a descriptor based DMA mechanism and the associated driver. For example, we can start a DMA transaction for 256KB from the device and it completes successfully. However, in this implementation we're only capturing the data in the kernel driver, and then dropping it and we aren't streaming the data to the user-space at all. Essentially, this is just a small DMA test implementation.
We think we have to separate the problem into three sections: 1. Kernel driver 2. Userspace API 3. User Code
The acquisition device has a register in the PCIe address space which indicates whether there is data to read for any channel from the device. So, our kernel driver must poll for this bit-vector. When the kernel driver sees this bit set, it starts a DMA transaction. The user application however does not need to know about all these DMA transactions and data, until an entire chunk of data is ready (For example, assume that the device provides us with 16 lines of video data per transaction, but we need to notify the user only when the entire video frame is ready). We need to only transfer entire frames to the user application.
Here was our first attempt:
Our user-side API allows a user application to register a function callback for a "channel".
The user-side API has a "start" function, which can be called by the user application, which uses ioctl to send a start message to the kernel driver.
In the kernel driver, upon receiving the start message, we started a kernel thread, which continuously monitors the "data ready" bit-vector, and when it sees new data, copies it over to a driver-allocated (kmalloc) buffer. It keeps doing this until the size of the collected data reaches the "frame size".
At this point a custom linux SIGNAL (similar to SIGINT, SIGHUP, etc) is sent to the process which is running the driver. Our API catches this signal and then calls back the appropriate user callback function.
The user callback function calls a function in the API (transfer_data), which uses an ioctl call to send a userspace buffer address to the kernel, and the kernel completes the data transfer by doing a copy_to_user of the channel frame data to userspace.
All of the above is working OK, except that the performance is abysmal. We can only achieve about 2MB/sec of transfer rate. We need to completely re-write this and we're open to any suggestions or pointers to examples.
Other notes:
Unfortunately, we can not change anything in the hardware device. So we must poll for the "data-ready" bit and start DMA based on that bit.
Some people suggested to look at Infiniband drivers as a reference, but we're completely lost in that code.
You're probably way past this now, but if not here's my 2p.
It's hard to believe that your card can't generate interrupts when
it has transferred data. It's got a DMA engine, and it can handle
'descriptors', which are presumably elements of a scatter-gather
list. I'll assume that it can generate a PCIe 'interrupt'; YMMV.
Don't bother trawling the kernel for existing similar drivers. You
might get lucky, but I suspect not.
You need to write a blocking read, which you supply a large memory buffer to. The driver read op (a) gets gets a list of user pages for your user buffer and locks them in memory (get_user_pages); (b) creates a scatter list with pci_map_sg; (c) iterates through the list (for_each_sg); (d) for each entry writes the corresponding physical bus address and data length to the DMA controller as what I presume you're calling a 'descriptor'.
The card now has a list of descriptors which correspond to the physical bus addresses of your large user buffer. When data arrives at the card, it writes it directly into user space, into your user buffer, while your user-level read is still blocked. When it has finished the descriptor list, the card has to be able to interrupt, or it's useless. The driver responds to the interrupt and unblocks your user-level read.
And that's it. The details are nasty, of course, and poorly documented, but that should be the basic architecture. If you really haven't got interrupts you can set up a timer in the kernel to poll for completion of transfer, but if it is really a custom card you should get your money back.

HW device via COM port, access individual pins

I'm currently working on a project which involves dealing with a HW device tailor-made for this purpose.
The device will serve the purpose of sending certain data via serial port (COM1, for instance). The data it is supposed to send doesn't matter that much.
I already have some knowledge regarding Windows serial port communication. CreateFile, WriteFile, and so on... BUT...
There is one "engine" on the device, which will send me the data when I ask it to, and in order to do so, I need to send there a signal (10101010) the rate of which will indicate the clock rate of that device "engine".
Here comes the explanation of how this device work. It gets a signal to send data through one pin. I'm supposed to send there 0 for start, 1 for end. Then, after this, it will watch some other pin for signal, sample it, and based on the frequency of ones and zeroes I send to it, it will start sending data via the thrid pin.
My questions are:
How to access individual pins of COM port?
How to manage the frequency and any delays I will need by myself?
I think that maybe I will have to do on this in kernel more by use of device drivers which will have to be developed.
There is an easier way. The COM port will send out the signal of alternating 1s and 0s if you just send a 0xAA byte.

Creating new task in FreeRTOS for USART reception

I am using EVK1105 development board with AVR Studio 5 as development IDE for my AVR project.
I am using FreeRTOS in it. I have 3 USART ports on this board. One external module is connected to my AVR32 board via USART-RS232 mode. It sends me continuous serial data to my board on USART0 with 19230 baudrate, 7-databits, odd parity, stopbit-1 and normal-channel mode. I created a new task for this purpose. After each 9 data bytes it sends '\n' and '\r'. So in my task I keep on collecting the 9 databytes in a string buffer and then transmit it on USART1. I am using polling method to collect data from USAR0 which is receiving port. But I am facing problem in receiving data. I don't know if its timing issue or something or the scheduler switches the task while collects the data. But I don't get the required data.
Following are things I have already checked as troubleshooting
1. Connected my external module to my PC hyper-terminal which gives me perfect result.
2. Implemented the same thing of using receiving from USART0 and whatever received is transmitted to USART1 as without FreeRTOS. Its works fine.
Please suggest some idea what may be wrong. I am using a queue to communicate between Tx and Rx task to pass the string buffer from USART0 to USART1. Is it problem in handling queue? How can I troubleshoot the queue?
I am using a delay of 50ms in my infinite task loop in Rx Task. Can it create a problem? If I don't use any delay the OS crashes. Please suggest some good practices to create a new task in FreeRTOS so that I will not get any timing issue.
For such a use case, I would not use a polling method with 50ms delay to retrieve data from UART peripheral. You can easily lose received data depending on the system load and UART reception buffer size.
At least use an interrupt on UART data reception that copies every received byte into a local buffer that will be read by your TX thread.
You can have an even better solution using a DMA channel to receive your data frame and be notified when 9 bytes have been received. I don't know if your AVR device has a DMA peripheral or not.
Are you still working on this? The statement of your problem is vague, but there I have several suggestions/leading questions.
1) You may want some documents to see what the registers are
Get the giant datasheet pdfs at
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/product_docs.asp?category_id=163&family_id=607&subfamily_id=2138&part_id=4117
2) In this and an earlier post you state that you have, in some cases, been able to RX data. You will need to find the USART HW initialization code from those example projects and get them into the freeRTOS example project. In particular calls to
gpio_enable_module() with {AVR32_USART0_RXD_0_0_PIN, AVR32_USART0_RXD_0_0_FUNCTION}
To connect to USART to CPU
and i believe
InitRs232()
Just doing this requires poking around a lot of code - there's alot of dependencies.
2) What function are you calling to retrieve data from USART0? 19kbaud is approximately 2000bytes/sec or 1 byte/0.5ms, so 50ms polling is not nearly enough. I'd suggest that your RX task poll continuously (never sleep explicitly) but at a lower priority than the TX task.
3) Concentrate on debugging the RX task at the call to retrieve data. Use the debugger to look at the hardware registers for the usart. In particular
USART0 cr register AVR32_USART_CR_RXEN_MASK should be set to enable RX
USART0 csr register AVR32_USART_CSR_RXRDY_MASK will indicate if there is new data there
You can also check the overlow flag to see if you have missed some data.
When the read of USART0 rhr occurs it should be a byte that you sent.
If you are still working on this I can look into this a bit more.

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