Adventures in TinyAVR 1-Series

[thefreeman]

Hmm, I put 100Ω on the RGB leds and PWM LED, 10K on the LED enable LED, I’ll try with more resistance on the two former, but it mirrors the issues on my driver, on which the load is on the uA order.

[thefreeman]

Testing with 10K resistors on the status leds, same result.
Moving led enable to PA5

PB0 PWM
PA5 led enable
PA1 R
PA2 G
PA3 B

No led enable.

Circuit on the breadboard :

I also checked with a voltmeter instead of status leds (i.e. the pins are only connected to the voltmeter), same result, I just used leds because it’s quicker for checking the pins status.

hwdef

So at this point I’m eliminating any issues with the circuit, it must be in the code.

In the present state if I want to use the attiny1616 with my driver I must wire the PWM, led enable and RBG on different ports, which is possible of course, just not as convenient as using any pins. But if there is functionality added for the current sense resistor selection, then that’ll possibly means it’ll have to be on another (nonexistant) port. (Toykeeper said she has an unfinished branch that might have functionality for this).

[gchart]

Ohhh, I think I finally noticed it. At least I hope so. When you set the DIR for those RGB, each write is wiping out the entire VPORTA.DIR contents.

Replace this:

    VPORTA.DIR = PIN5_bm;  //enable
    VPORTB.DIR = PIN0_bm;   // PWM
    VPORTA.DIR = PIN1_bm; //R
    VPORTA.DIR = PIN2_bm; //G
    VPORTA.DIR = PIN3_bm; //B

With this:

    VPORTA.DIR = PIN5_bm | PIN3_bm | PIN2_bm | PIN1_bm;  //enable, R, G, B
    VPORTB.DIR = PIN0_bm;   // PWM

Or perhaps (note the added pipes):

    VPORTA.DIR |= PIN5_bm;  //enable
    VPORTB.DIR |= PIN0_bm;   // PWM
    VPORTA.DIR |= PIN1_bm; //R
    VPORTA.DIR |= PIN2_bm; //G
    VPORTA.DIR |= PIN3_bm; //B

BTW, SpenceKonde has a nice write up on AVR’s bit manipulation with the PORT & VPORT registers here

[thefreeman]

Yes it works, of course I should have properly copied the syntax from your hwdef files… sorry for having the stupid.

Thank you :+1:

[gchart]

Great!! You’re welcome

[thefreeman]

@ToyKeeper

For 5/10 MHz, I just measured the PWM speed and got 19.22 kHz… which suggests it’s either fast PWM at 5 MHz or phase-correct at 10 MHz. Looking at the code, it appears to be 5 MHz with fast PWM. I haven’t measured that before on this MCU, but older models had issues with fast PWM at low levels and at full output, since each pulse would turn on and off at least for one cycle regardless of the target value… so 0/255 wasn’t fully off and 255/255 wasn’t fully on. So it may be worth some investigation to see if that’s still the case, and maybe switch to phase-correct 10MHz. But that’s just a minor potential optimization for later.

At 1023/1023 it’s not fully on, it’s off the same amount of time it’s on at 1/1023, 200ns so 1 cycle.

[gchart]

Is that with TCA? Does it act the same way in 8-bit? And does 0/1023 go fully off?

[thefreeman]

Yes and yes.

Edit : for the 3rd question I’m guessing no, anduril apparently turns the flashligh off (led enable goes off) when putting 0 as the floor so it’s not obvious, but shortly before that the level just stops at 1/1023 for like half a second, instead of smoothly going to 0.

[thefreeman]

Looking with the scope, it seems that having the PWM pin (e.g. PB0) connected to a floating pin (e.g. PC0), doesn’t affect the waveform. The difference in current draw with the floating pin is about 50~100uA. I might do that, that way the hardware would be compatible with both TCA and TCD.

[Dlux]

Interesting thefreeman, I thought that a floating pin would consume a significant amount of power.
Thanks all of you for sharing your progress, it is being a really entertaining reading for me.

[gchart]

Great to know! That would certainly be handy for a development/testing build so that you can play around with trying to get TCD working. The 50-100 uA isn’t a whole lot, but more than I would want in a production light. Is that the case for both while the MCU is awake and sleeping? I’ve always heard that a pin shouldn’t be left floating in order to minimize current draw, but I’ve been curious about just how big of an impact it makes.

[thefreeman]

@thefreeman

Hmm, and here I was wondering if it mattered if the V+ for flashing was connected before or after the LDO, if like, the MCU was powered from a lower voltage (ldo voltage) than the UDPI signal it would cause issues (maybe a stupid question…).

So after of before the LDO it works, also when powered by another source e.g. the battery. Mike already mentionned it but with the LDO I wanted to test to be sure.

@gchart

Is that the case for both while the MCU is awake and sleeping?

Uh, I’m not sure, I’ll have to re test.

[gchart]

Good to know! I haven't experimented much with it, but ElTangas says that as long as the VCC at the MCU is ~60%+ of the programmer's voltage, it should work just fine.

GitHub - ElTangas/jtag2updi: UPDI programmer software for Arduino (targets...

@ElTangas

Currently, I have not tested this software with a level shifter, however, since the UPDI pin is high voltage tolerant, it's ok to have V_prog > V_target, but not the reverse. Warning: only the UPDI pins of devices that support high voltage programming should be assumed to be high voltage tolerant. This is not the case for the MegaAVR 0-series or AVR-DA series! However, the current injection spec for I/O pins on these parts is far more generous that it is for older AVR devices it is not clear if the UPDI pin is included in this.

Notice, however, that the logic levels need to be compatible for successful programming: V_target cannot be lower than about 60% of V_prog (60% will likelly work, 70% is guaranteed to work). Therefore, it will not be possible to program a 2.5V target with a 5.0V programmer, because communication errors will surely occur (but no electrical damage), but if V_target is 3.3V (66% of 5.0V) chances are good.

                                            V_prog                 V_target
                                              +-+                     +-+
                                               |                       |
 +----------+          +---------------------+ |                       | +--------------------+
 | PC       |          | Programmer          +-+                       +-+  Target            |
 | avrdude  |          |                     |      +----------+         |                    |
 |       TX +----------+ RX              PD6 +------+   4k7    +---------+ UPDI               |
 |          |          |                     |      +----------+         |                    |
 |       RX +----------+ TX                  |                           |                    |
 |          |          |                     |                           |                    |
 |          |          |                     |                           |                    |
 |          |          |                     +--+                     +--+                    |
 +----------+          +---------------------+  |                     |  +--------------------+
             JTAGICE MkII                      +-+     UPDI          +-+
             Protocol                          GND     Protocol      GND

[thefreeman]

60% of 5V so 3V? LDO is 2.8V on my driver, so maybe it wont be entirely reliable, hmm, the programmer’s voltage can’t be lowered ?

Edit : I guess it’s directly the USB voltage so it can’t be lowered.

[thefreeman]

I tested with a bench PSU, it flashes without errors down to VCC = 1.9V, at 1.8V it reads the device but fails at erasing.

[gchart]

I just pushed a few changes to my Anduril2 branch:

• Switched to 10 MHz clock and Phase-Correct (dual slope) PWM instead of Fast (single slope) PWM at 5 MHz. This results in the same effective PWM speed: 19.6 kHz in the upper ranges, down to 4.9 kHz in the lowest modes (due to the dynamic underclocking mechanism).
• Added some documentation to the PWM setup code including a some instructions and a link to the datasheet
• Instead of Factory Reset forcing a thermal offset to assume an ambient temperature of 21°C, a Factory Reset for the 1-Series will clear any user-set thermal offset since the internal sensor is factory calibrated.

[thefreeman]

Nice!

• phase correct allows for full on and full off PWM, are there other advantages ? For drivers where we use the filtered PWM signal it’s not really an issue to have 1/resolution-1 as the min/max, and running the MCU slower saves power so if there are no other advantages then fast PWM is preferable.

edit :

Not relevant for us then.

[gchart]

@thefreeman

phase correct allows for full on and full off PWM, are there other advantages ? For drivers where we use the filtered PWM signal it’s not really an issue to have 1/resolution-1 as the min/max, and running the MCU slower saves power so if there are no other advantages then fast PWM is preferable.

I’m not aware of other benefits, it’s mostly to just get the Full-On and Full-Off signals.

For the drivers with a filtered PWM signal, you can still use Single Slope (Fast) when setting up the PWM in hwdef. And in the config file, just set the QUATERSPEED_LEVEL and HALFSPEED_LEVEL really high so that the MCU is running underclocked most all of the time. At least that’s the easiest thing I can think of at the moment.

[SammysHP]

Haven’t checked the datasheet, but what’s the required voltage and power consumption for the higher clock? Could it be an issue?

[gchart]

That’s possible. I don’t have a bench power supply and scope to really say for sure. The datasheet says 10 MHz is good down to 2.7 volts.