[time-nuts] TruePosition and Arduino Progress

[jimlux]

On 5/21/17 11:20 AM, Chris Albertson wrote:
> The problem is that you get the ENTIRE string then parse it.  This is
> not going to work well as you found out.   Your CPU spends almost the
> entire time waiting for characters to come in slowly off the serial
> line.  You are just waiting on bits and wasting CPU cycles

On many Arduinos these days, the "getSerialString()" is a 
buffered/interrupt driven routine under the hood - it's not burning many 
cycles.

That said, even if your serial port code was "spin on a bit", you can do 
a lot of parsing/processing pretty quickly.  Arduinos aren't 4 MHz Z80s 
or 8051s.  The modern crop have 50 MHz clocks and a millisecond is a lot 
of instructions.


>
> What you need to do is parse one character at a time.   I bet your
> parser reads one character at a time from the string.   Have it read
> one character at a time directly from the serial port.   (Use a state
> machine.  It will work for such a simple  job as this)
>
> Yes if your CPU was MUCH faster your plan could work.  But on some
> GPSes the data never has a break.   You are trying to do ALL the work
> in the break but actually most of the down time when you should be
> working is between the characters.    There is not a lot of work a
> finite state machine needs to do between characters, just move state
> based on a 'character class" table.

I think that would be overkill, it's a lot harder to write a state 
machine than a simple "is the first N characters $GPPGA?" kind of thing. 
You'd want to write a generalized parser first if only to make sure that 
you're decoding the strings properly.  You'd run your arduino code with 
a "getSerialString()" then a "Serial.print(str)" in a loop, then cut and 
paste from the console display into a file, then run your decoder 
against it.





    I you ever studied this
> formally, what you are building here is a "lexer" not a parcer.   The
> "Language" is not recursive and you never need to backtrack so it can
> be de-coded literally one character at a time.
>
> You DO really want the 1PPS to drive an interrupt.   Thisway you just
> continue working on the data stream and don't wait for the PPS.   When
> the PPS happens you do something QUICK. never do anything time
> consuming in the ISR or you will miss the next serial character.
> increment a seconds count and write two bytes the the LCD and exit

Thats what the Arduino "AttachInterrupt()" is for

attachInterrupt(digitalPinToInterrupt(pin), ISR, mode);
  where mode is probably going to be "RISING".

Nothing fancy in the ISR, just a "1ppsdetected++;" or something.

then in the void loop(), you do a test on 1ppsdetected

if (1ppsdetected>0){
	1ppsdetected = 0;
	update_display();
}

>
> On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 6:45 AM, Ben Hall <kd5byb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Good morning all,
>>
>> A quick update for those interested on my Arduino code development for the
>> TruePosition boards.  I've got Arduino code together than can read in the
>> serial stream, parse it, and display time, date, number of satellites, and
>> TFOM on a 2x16 LCD display.  It does not do multiple screens, handle survey,
>> or display lat/long yet.
>>
>> What I'm having issues with is handling the 1 PPS.  Ideally, I want to use
>> the 1PPS signal to trigger the display update.  IE:
>>
>> void loop()
>> {
>> getSerialString()  // uses serial.available to pull in the serial data
>>
>> parser()  // this parses the data
>>
>> wait for 1PPS tick to go high
>>
>> if there has been a clock message, updateDispay()  // update the display
>> }
>>
>> This works great when there is a just a clock message.  But when there is a
>> clock message, an extstatus message, and a status message, it seems like it
>> is still parsing when the 1PPS tick comes in...so it will display seconds as
>> follows:  30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, etc...
>>
>> (If I don't wait for the 1PPS tick, it seems that my clock is one second
>> fast.  I say "seems" to be fast, as the time agrees with an NTP clock on one
>> computer, but seems a half second slow per GPSCon's time display on the
>> Z3801.  I think I need to put up the antenna and check against WWV.)
>>
>> I've got one of those cheap little USB logic analyzers on order to figure
>> out how much time elapses between the clock, extstatus, status, and 1PPS
>> tick.  I may need something faster than an Arduino Uno to do this.
>>
>> I'm sure there is a way to do this with an interrupt...but I couldn't make
>> that work yesterday.  More to follow.
>>
>> thanks much and 73,
>> ben, kd5byb
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