2.3 Hello There!

Looking for a “you had me at hello” moment? Let’s see how serial transmission works for you.

Implementation

I make a copy of board.c into usart1tx.c to add support for the USART1 peripheral.

In order to make a first transmission, the peripherals have to be initialized. As the TX/RX of USART1 are mapped on pin PA9 and PA10, we need to configure GPIOA first.

GPIOA needs to be enabled via RCC AHB Enable Register as GPIOs are on AHB bus.
PA9 and PA10 set to alternate mode.
Alternate function USART1 selected for PA9 and PA10.

Then USART1 can be configured:

USART1 enabled via RCC APB2 Enable Register as USARTs are on the APB bus.
Baud rate set to 9600 bauds.
USART itself and transmission needs to be enabled via the Control Register (CR1).

By default the transmission format is 8N1: 8 bit data, no parity and 1 stop bit.

/* USART1 9600 8N1 */
    RCC_AHBENR |= RCC_AHBENR_IOP( A) ;  /* Enable GPIOA periph */
    GPIOA[ MODER] |= 0x0A << (9 * 2) ;  /* PA9-10 ALT 10, over default 00 */
    GPIOA[ AFRH] |= 0x110 ;             /* PA9-10 AF1 0001, over default 0000 */
    RCC_APB2ENR |= RCC_APB2ENR_USART1EN ;
    USART1[ BRR] = 8000000 / 9600 ;     /* PCLK [8MHz] */
    USART1[ CR1] |= USART_CR1_UE | USART_CR1_TE ;   /* Enable USART & Tx */

Sending data is done by writing in the Transmission Data Register (TDR). To check if it is ready for transmission you must check the state of the TX Empty (TXE) bit in the Interrupt & Status Register (ISR).

I write a basic kputc() function that does busy waiting if the TDR is not empty and insures that LF are mapped to CR LF. The ‘k’ in kputc refer to ‘kernel’, as kputc is a low level function that will be used mostly for debugging. With the busy wait and the recursive code this implementation is definitively not optimal, but it’s functional and that’s what matter most at this stage.

void kputc( unsigned char c) {
    static unsigned char lastc ;

    if( c == '\n' && lastc != '\r')
        kputc( '\r') ;

/* Active wait while transmit register is full */
    while( (USART1[ ISR] & USART_ISR_TXE) == 0) ;

    USART1[ TDR] = c ;
    lastc = c ;
}

The high level C function I need for this simple test is puts(). I make my own implementation but I keep the same declaration as the standard header that come with the C compiler.

Finally I use a standard C implementation for hello.c.

/* hello.c -- hello there */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main( void) {
    puts( "hello, world") ;
    return EXIT_SUCCESS ;
}

Build

To build I update the software composition in Makefile by adding a new SRCS line.

SRCS = startup.c usart1tx.c hello.c

Calling make, I can see that there is now some variable in BSS section of the RAM. It is lastchar local to kputc(). Because of word alignment BSS occupies 4 bytes.

$ make
f030f4.elf
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
    413       0       4     417     1a1 f030f4.elf
f030f4.hex
f030f4.bin

Testing

After flashing the board with the new executable, I place back the BOOT0 jumper and press the reset button, the board user LED blinks as usual but I can see the RX LED on the USB to UART adapter flash briefly when I release the reset button.

On Windows PC, if I use PuTTY or Arduino IDE to open COM4 at 9600 baud, every time I press and release the reset button I can see ‘hello, world’ displayed on a new line in the terminal window.

On Linux, when I plug in the USB to UART adapter, it enumerates as /dev/ttyUSB0, so it is compatible with the USB driver for serial ports. If I try to open it with Arduino IDE, I get an error message as I need to belong to dialout group to open that TTY for reading and writing.

sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER

Once added to dialout, I can open /dev/ttyUSB0 at 9600 baud in Arduino IDE, each time I press and release the board RESET button, I can see ‘hello, world’ displayed on a new line in the Serial Monitor window.

Checkpoint

I have now a functional serial transmission channel through USART1. I have only a first implementation for puts(), but I will add support for other stdio functions when needed.

Next I will switch to a tool for flashing over serial connection that works on both Windows and Linux.