[time-nuts] Linux PPS clues?

[Attila Kinali]

On Thu, 20 Oct 2016 10:59:21 +0100
"David J Taylor" <david-taylor at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

> Actually, of the 15 Raspberry Pi cards I have only one is used in a graphics 
> application.

Yes, the rpi are used for all kind of stuff and there is a huge community
around them that helps with all kind of questions. Unfortunately, the
rpi is also used for all kind of stuff that it is a suboptimal choice
(to put it mildly), but people do not care or do not want to check
for alternatives. It kind of works, that's all they care about.

> On the positive side they work very well with external devices for control 
> and measurement, 

And for most of these applications a 32bit uC that uses a fraction of
the power would be the right choice. Often a clock of 1MHz would be enough.

> and have a huge amount of software and hardware support for 
> a vast range of devices which makes for fast and easy development.  

That's the only plus side. But then, most of the code written in C
can be used on a uC just the same with little to no modification.

> I will be interested to see what is recommended for a 100 kHz event rate.

This is actually a very tough question. 100kHz means that for each event
there is only 10µs available for detection, processing and output. Using
a uC that would be something in the order of 1000-2000 CPU cycles. On an
application processor (rpi and its cusins) that would be 2000 to 20'000 cycles.
While 1000 cycles on a uC is quite a lot, you cannot do any fancy processing
with so few cycles.

On the application processor 20k cylces is plenty, but you have the complex
OS that eats up a few thousand cycles itself. Addtionally there comes
the interrupt latency that the application processors suffer from, which
is in the order of 1-10µs... So they would need a kind of (hardware) system
to queue up the events to process them in badges. Because of this, an rpi
wouldn't work at all (bitbanging takes several µs for each operation).

Going for an uC is easier in that regard as they have very little interrupt
latency (usually just 5-10 cycles), but then you have problems with
getting the output out of the uC as their I/O subsystems are usually
optimized to work in a stand-alone fashion. 

Maybe one way would be to use an arm9/cortex-a5 based uC (ie not an application
processor) and use their high speed I/O. 

For better answers, I would need to know what kind of events these are
and what exactly need to be done/measured.

			Attila Kinali


-- 
Malek's Law:
        Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way.