Efficient synchronous serial read with gpio

Hi guys,

I have recently purchased a Freetronics IR Temperature sensor and have been using it on the Beaglebone Black. I have been using the supplied c++ arudino code which I modified to access GPIO pins on the BBB.

However it uses 60-80% of the cpu when running. The synchronous serial algorithm is inefficient as it uses while loops to wait for the clock to cycle.

Is there a better, more efficient, way to read synchronous serial over gpio pins?

Thanks!

Hi,

Looking at the driver code, this device has an interface that is almost SPI, except that the clock is driven by the device and the chip select (what they call aquire) is driven by the BBB. Because it is not standard SPI you can’t use the SPI interface on the BBB.

The best you could do would be to change the mode of the clock input pin so that it generates an interrupt on each rising edge. Your interrupt handler would read the data line and collect 1 bit at each interrupt. The interrupt handler would build the 5 data bytes, and save them into the data array and then signal the main application when all 5 bytes have been read. The main application would take the acquire signal low to start the measurement, then wait (suspended by the kernel) until the I/O complete signal was received from the interrupt handler. It would then release the acquire signal and process the data in the buffer as it does now.

This would replace all the busy waiting with 40 short interrupt handler executions, and a short burst of activity at the beginning and end of each measurement. The CPU load would probably be too low to measure.

HTH
Dennis Cote