Lab four (Digital Systems)

This lab introduces micro:bian, a very simple embedded operating system kernel. The directory lab4-microbian contains the following files:

Makefile	Build script
hardware.h	Header file with layout of I/O registers
lib.c, lib.h	Library with implementation of printf
startup.c	Startup code
nRF51822.ld	Linker script
microbian.c, microbian.h	Operating system
mpx-m0.s	Context switch code for Cortex-M0
Device drivers:
serial.c	Serial port
timer.c	Timer
i2c.c	I2C bus (incl. accelerometer)
radio.c	2.4GHz radio
Example programs:
ex-heart.c	Heart and primes
ex-echo.c	Echo lines from keyboard
ex-race.c	Relative process speeds
ex-today.c	Mutual exclusion
ex-level.c	Accelerometer-based spirit level
ex-remote.c	Remote button presses

There are several example programs for you to experiment with:

• heart is the ultimate version of the electronic Valentine's card, containing independent, concurrent processes for displaying the beating heart and printing the romantic list of prime numbers on the serial port.
• echo is a simple test program for the UART driver. You can type lines of text on the keyboard, with echoing and line editing, and they are printed back when you press Return.
• race is a demonstration of scheduling uncertainty: one process increments a counter while another periodically prints its value. The precise sequence of values printed depends on when the processes are scheduled.
• today is an exercise in mutual exclusion: two politicians repeatedly spout their slogans, but they cannot be understood unless an interviewer intervenes to make them take turns.
• level is an electronic spirit level. It uses the I²C bus to talk to the accelerometer chip on the micro:bit, and it displays a single moving pixel that responds when the board is tilted.
• remote is a radio-based remote control. If two or more micro:bits in the same room are running the program, then pressing button A or B on one of them will cause all the others to display A or B respectively.

To support these programs, the operating system kernel (in microbian.c) is augmented with drivers for the UART (in serial.c), a system timer (timer.c), the I²C bus that links the processor to the on-board accelerometer and magnetometer (i2c.c), and the 2.4GHz packet radio intergrated into the microcontroller (radio.c). For simplicity, the header file microbian.h declares in one place the routines provided by all these modules.

Typing make or choosing Build>Make as usual compiles all the example programs into hex files ready for download to the micro:bit. With one of the example programs open, you can choose Build>Upload me to upload the corresponding hex file to the micro:bit.

Tasks

1. Heart: Try removing the system call that gives the display process a higher priority than the primes process. Then start searching for primes at 1000000 or 10000000 instead of 2. Observe the results, then reinstate the priority. Why should the display process have a higher priority than the primes process?
2. Race: Run the program and observe the output. Then try swapping the two calls the start() from init(). Why does this affect the action of the program? Although unpredictable in advance, the results printed are actually consistent from run to run: why is that? Try adding a driver for the RNG (see below), and see if just doing that introduces enough randomness to make the results change from run to run.
3. Today: Run the program and observe the output. Then introduce an interviewer process that makes the two politicians speak in turn. One solution has each politician passing its slogans to the interviewer; another has the interviewer giving permission to a politician to speak until they indicate they have finished.
4. Make a driver process for the hardware random number generator. Write a program that shows random dice rolls on the display whenever a button is pressed.
5. Alternatively, there is an onboard sensor that measures the temperature of the processor die, giving an answer in quarters of a degree Celsius. It generates an interrupt when data is ready, but then suspends itself until started again. Write a device driver for it.
6. Construct a test program to measure the time taken to send and receive a message as the length of an output pulse. Experiment to find the combination of circumstances that makes this quickest: does sending the message with sendrec help, and why?
7. Design an interesting multi-person application that uses the radio to communicate. As configured, the radio module can broadcast packets containing up to 32 bytes of payload. For point-to-point communication, you could embed a destination address in each packet, and have each micro:bit ignore messages that were not addressed to it. One idea is to implement the chain reaction game.

Documentation

• For micro:bian itself: there is a page describing the kinds of processes and messages supported by micro:bian, and another page with unix-style manual pages for each system call.
• For the device drivers: another page describes the facitilies provided by each device driver.

Typically, a device driver supports two interfaces: one based on messages sent to the driver task, and responses that are sent back; and another that consists of a collection of functions that client processes can call, with each such function constructing one or messages on the stack of the calling process, then sending them to the device driver task. Both are described on the linked page.