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Shall we teach Multitasking with NimBLE Porting Layer? 1️⃣ Looks easier than FreeRTOS 2️⃣ It's portable to FreeRTOS, Mynewt, NuttX and RIOT OS 🤔

lupyuen.github.io/pinetime-rus

Our Build, Flash and Run Firmware script generates the Disassembly ... Let's track down the address of the RISC-V Exception

github.com/lupyuen/bl_iot_sdk/

Exception happened because we passed a pointer to a stack object ... Which gets used by the Interrupt Handler 😲 ... This works OK in the original Mynewt code, but not for BL602

gist.github.com/lupyuen/1539f9

Reference Manual mentions "GPIO_INT_CLR" but the address is undefined in the doc ... Methinks a chunk of addresses are missing from the doc 🤔

github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs

shows Stack Trace when CONFIG_ENABLE_FP=1 ... But the addresses don't make sense ... They belong to the code that's dumping the Stack Trace 🤔

github.com/lupyuen/bl_iot_sdk/

Oops needs us to "make clean ; make" to fix up the Stack Frame Pointers ... Now BL602 Stack Trace points to the "ebreak" instruction ... Which belongs to the Exception Handler 🙄

github.com/lupyuen/bl_iot_sdk/

Below the Exception Handler Stack ... Is another Stack! ... Does this Stack contain the Stack Trace that we need? 🤔

gist.github.com/lupyuen/5ddbcd

Answer: "radio_events" contains Undefined Fields ... Because it was allocated on the Stack! Lesson Learnt: ALWAYS Init Stack Variables! 🙏

github.com/apache/mynewt-core/

Back to our Stack Trace ... Yep the Correct Stack Trace is indeed lurking behind our (unhelpful) Exception Stack Trace ... How shall we show the Correct Stack Trace beyond the Emptiness? 🤔

gist.github.com/lupyuen/5ddbcd

To conserve battery power, Sensors don't always listen for incoming packets ... They listen for a few seconds then go back to sleep. 😴 LoRa Receive Timeout is the last thing we shall implement for

github.com/lupyuen/bl_iot_sdk/

Driver creates hundreds of SPI DMA Requests ... Each request reads / writes only ONE byte! 🙄 ... Note to future self: Combine the SPI DMA Requests

github.com/lupyuen/bl_iot_sdk/

@PINE64 receiving Packets from RAKwireless ... All shall be explained in this article. Thanks for reading this looong thread 🙏

lupyuen.github.io/articles/lor

@lupyuen wow, that is some crappy implementation by the sound of it! Honestly I am surprised, usually the low-level uC people (the ones working with assembly and C) tend to do a way better job than that.

@freemo Haha ahem ... I ported this LoRa driver from Mynewt OS. The driver was designed for platforms without DMA.

Since we support DMA on BL602, we can do better ... But the driver needs to be redesigned.

@lupyuen Well if its just a hacked together port and not a write from scratch then at least it meakes sense why.. I was worried it was intentional or written from scratch and just poor design.

@lupyuen
What hw part is being talked to over said dma? Does order of dma reads matter? Can you cache requests issue dma read burst and send result asynchronously etc or per queue keeping order? We had similar problem in nokia on radiomodules i think. Dont remember exact solution though.

@PawelK I ported the driver from Mynewt OS to BL602.

Since I don't have the time to redesign the driver and do a thorough regression test ... We'll have to live with this inefficiency for now.

@lupyuen
Can you let me peek at source before port and after port? Curious. Not strong in dma but curious of it.

@PawelK Original LoRa SX1276 Driver for Mynewt OS:

github.com/apache/mynewt-core/

Ported to BL602:

github.com/lupyuen/bl_iot_sdk/

The original code calls "hal_spi_tx_val", which is a Mynewt SPI Function that transfers 1 byte over SPI. It's clearly not designed for DMA.

@lupyuen
Ahh dma is sync and regions are continuous. Looks easy peasy. Ill try to play with this code if youll allow. Wish i had a board to play with.

@PawelK Erm I'm still making changes to the driver and I'm writing an article about this driver ... Maybe we hold off the changes till I'm done?

@lupyuen
Three questions. Is there upper bound or enum of served lengths of buffers?
Can we alloc temp buffers on stack or should globals be used? Do You suggest using fixed chunks say 16 bytes plus trailer use or can we dynalloc full buffers?

@lupyuen
Yes uninit vars suck. Llvm/clang autowarns or can error on this. Has great static checker too and plenty of warnings etc.

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