Previously, the machine.UART0 object had two meanings:
- it was the first UART on the chip
- it was the default output for println
These two meanings conflict, and resulted in workarounds like:
- Defining UART0 to refer to the USB-CDC interface (atsamd21,
atsamd51, nrf52840), even though that clearly isn't an UART.
- Defining NRF_UART0 to avoid a conflict with UART0 (which was
redefined as a USB-CDC interface).
- Defining aliases like UART0 = UART1, which refer to the same
hardware peripheral (stm32).
This commit changes this to use a new machine.Serial object for the
default serial port. It might refer to the first or second UART
depending on the board, or even to the USB-CDC interface. Also, UART0
now really refers to the first UART on the chip, no longer to a USB-CDC
interface.
The changes in the runtime package are all just search+replace. The
changes in the machine package are a mixture of search+replace and
manual modifications.
This commit does not affect binary size, in fact it doesn't affect the
resulting binary at all.
This means that machine.UART0, machine.UART1, etc are of type
*machine.UART, not machine.UART. This makes them easier to pass around
and avoids surprises when they are passed around by value while they
should be passed around by reference.
There is a small code size impact in some cases, but it is relatively
minor.
Make the USBCDC use a pointer receiver everywhere. This makes it easier
to pass around the object in the future.
This commit sometimes changes code size, but not significantly (a few
bytes) and usually in a positive way.
My eventual goal is the following:
- Declare `machine.USB` (or similar, name TBD) as a pointer receiver
for the USB-CDC interface.
- Let `machine.UART0` always point to an UART, never actually to a
USBCDC object.
- Define `machine.Serial`, which is either a real UART or an USB-CDC,
depending on the board.
This way, if you want a real UART you can use machine.UARTx and if you
just want to print to the default serial port, you can use
machine.Serial.
This change does have an effect on code size and memory consumption.
There is often a small reduction (-8 bytes) in RAM consumption and an
increase in flash consumption.
It is always implemented exactly the same way (as an uint8) so there is
no reason to implement it in each target separately.
This also makes it easier to add some documentation to it.
This commit replaces most heap allocations in USB related code with
stack allocations. This is important for several reasons:
- It avoids running the GC unnecessarily.
- It reduces code size by 400-464 bytes.
- USB code might be called from interrupt handlers. The heap may be in
an inconsistent state when that happens if main thread code also
performs heap allocations.
The last one is by far the most important one: not doing heap
allocations in interrupts is critical for correctness. But the code size
reduction alone should be worth it.
There are two heap allocations in USB related code left: in the function
receiveUSBControlPacket (SAMD21 and SAMD51). This heap allocation must
also be removed because it runs in an interrupt, but I've left that for
a future change.
There doesn't appear to be a user-controllable LED outside of the LED
matrix. In fact, the pin assigned for this was P13, which was connected
to the SPI SCK pin.
See "STM32F40x and STM32F41x Errata sheet" - SPI CLK port must be 'fast' or 'very fast' to avoid data corruption on last bit (at the APB clocks we configure).
This commit refactors PWM support in the machine package to be more
flexible. The new API can be used to produce tones at a specific
frequency and control servos in a portable way, by abstracting over
counter widths and prescalers.
This makes it possible to assign I2C objects (machine.I2C0,
machine.I2C1, etc.) without needing to take a pointer.
This is important especially in the future when I2C may be driven using
DMA and the machine.I2C type needs to store some state.
These stubs don't really belong there: attiny currently doesn't directly
support I2C at all (although it has hardware to support a software
implementation).
