RFFE Controller Firmware

WARNING: This firmware is no longer maintained and should not be used! The new firmware for RFFE boards is https://github.com/lnls-dig/rffe-uc-fw

Firmware for the RFFE Control Boards, based on MBED, using a Cortex M3 LPC1768 processor.

Pre-requisites

The following packages must be installed on your system in order to compile the firmware:

• gcc-arm-none-eabi

gcc-arm-none-eabi can be installed from the pre-compiled files found at: https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded/+download or you can run the following command under Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-none-eabi

Next step is to clone this repository into your workspace. Since we're using the mbed libraries as a submodule, you MUST run the git clone command with the --recursive option.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/lnls-dig/rffe-fw

If you've already cloned the repository without the recursive option, go to the source folder and run:

cd mbed-os
git submodule update --init --recursive

Compilation

Go to the repository folder

cd /path/to/repo/

Run make (you can add the -j4 flag to speed up the proccess) :

make -j4

A few flags can be set in order to match your hardware setup, which are:

ETH_INTERFACE=<FIX_IP|DHCP>
TEMP_SENSOR=<ADT7320|LM71>

If not set, the Makefile will output a warning and use a default value for each.

Example using fixed IP addressing and ADT7320 temperature sensor:

make -j4 ETH_INTERFACE=FIX_IP IP=10.2.119.203 GATEWAY=10.2.119.1 TEMP_SENSOR=ADT7320

NOTE: The compiler will print a few warnings, most of them are regarding the mbed libraries, but since they have a stable version on github, we'll just ignore those warnings.

Both a .elf file and a .bin file will be generated in the source folder. You can use any one you prefer to program your processor.

To clean the compilation files (binaries, objects and dependence files), just run

make clean

Programming

To program the firmware in the MBED board, just plug in a USB cable in its frontal jack in your computer and a MBED drive will be mounted (the MBED will get its power from the USB +5v).

Copy the generated binary file before into the MBED storage and reset the board (Power Cycle or Reset button).

IMPORTANT: You MUST NOT rename the generated binary file, otherwise the firmware will delete its own file upon start. The MBED bootloader will run only the newest binary file found in its drive, therefore, you can have multiple revisions of the firmware stored for backup purposes, but they'll be renamed from *.bin to *.old automatically on boot.

Logging

A useful procedure if to log the serial messages from the RFFE via serial cable for debugging purposes. In order to do that, one can use the following logrotate configration file, so to keep long-running logs in a machine:

cat <<-EOF > /etc/logrotate.d/rffe-debug
    /var/log/rffe-debug/*.log {
        hourly
        rotate 20
        size 100K
        maxsize 1M
        compress
        missingok
        notifempty
        postrotate
        /bin/kill -HUP `cat /run/rffe-debug.pid 2>/dev/null` 2> /dev/null || true
        (sudo screen -c /var/log/rffe-debug/screenrc -L /dev/ttyACM0 115200) & PID=$(echo $!) && sudo bash -c "touch /run/rffe-debug.pid  && echo ${PID} > /run/rffe-debug.pid"
        endscript
    }
EOF

Just copy the above commands into a terminal and set logrotate to run at a resonable time, like 1 minute so as to not keep logs too larger than the limit.

Remember to change the TTY port to the correct one when using this. Most of the time it will by ttyACM0, but it's not guaranteed.

As a last reminder. The procedure will be more useful if the RFFE is set to use debug flags. Fow now, just define the symbol DEBUG_PRINTF at the beggining of main.cpp file:

#define DEBUG_PRINTF