erainstruments / erasynth-firmware

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Serial communication interferes with sweep triggering, + suggestion #8

Open sidneycadot opened 2 years ago

sidneycadot commented 2 years ago

Hi all,

As communicated by email, it is important that there is no communication over the serial port while doing triggered sweeps, because the processor's handling of the serial I/O interferes with the timing of the interrupt that is used to proceed to the next sweep step.

This fact needs to be prominently documented. (It would be even better if it were fixed but I realize that could be pretty difficult).

As an added suggestion:

It would be very helpful if there were a way to query the final sweep frequency and total number of trigger events processed over the serial interface. As per the preceding remark, this should not be done while a sweep is in progress; but for a client program driving the Erasynth, it would be very useful to be able to check these values after performing a sweep, to verify that no triggers were lost. (Which can happen if triggers come in at more than 2 kHz, or if there was serial communication during the sweep, or if there's some electronics problem).

I think adding such variables to the instrument's internal state and exposing them over the serial port should not be too hard.