[time-nuts] Linux PPS clues?

Attila Kinali attila at kinali.ch
Fri Oct 21 08:40:22 UTC 2016


On Thu, 20 Oct 2016 21:45:42 +0000
Ilia Platone <info at iliaplatone.com> wrote:

> >> 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.

> I can use one of my boards, which have (checked better) 6MHz sampling 
> frequency on the GPIO, but the sysclock runs at 180MHz, this should be 
> enough except logging support bandwidth. check the NXP3130 uC which is 
> powering these boards: it's old but its dirty job is done perfectly.

[...]

> These events are random photon arrivals (converted to 5vTTL pulses), 
> their rate was measured using the pulse width of the smaller detected, 
> which was 5~10 uS during an observation in low-light environment.
> The photon arrival and pulse width were random with a minimum pulse 
> width of 10uS. What I want to do is measuring the photon arrival 
> precisely (low to high transition - interrupt I guess), consider that 
> the maximum rate would be 100Kcps because the photon events would 
> overlap if higher. If the 3130 controller can handle such rate it would 
> be great :)

The LPC3130 is IMHO the wrong choice. It does neither have capture/compare
timer units (ie units that can capture when an input event happend) nor
does it have interrupts on GPIO. Hence you would need to poll the pins
continuously while at the same time making sure that the USB port is
properly handled. This will give you a high uncertainty when the event
really happend.

I would definitely use a different board than this.

My advice would be to use one of the many high performance Cortex-M4 boards
I recently had a look at the LPC4330, which should be plenty fast for
this job. But really any other uC with an HS USB port and capture/compare
should do. Then run a minimimal OS on it (Nuttx comes to mind) to give
you the basic functionality you need without too much trouble. Upon each
event, store the value of the capture register in a ring buffer(1k-2k large).
Read that ring buffer in the main loop and push the data out of the USB port
in chuncks of 512byte to get maximum throughput. Use a PC to record the
data for later processing.


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



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