Here’s the build log for week three of development for the open source function generator I’m trying to prototype and build in time for for OSHWA 2020.

Each day’s entry represents an hour’s work per day - the hour before I leave for my job every weekday morning.

This is my log for the week ending Feb 21, 2020. (Well, actually, Feb 22. Make-up workday.) You can read up on the first week’s work here, and the second week’s work here

Feb 22 2020

Doing a quick hour’s work on Saturday morning as a make-up for missing Friday.

Working on a nice way to both store the DDS chip state in a single block of memory, and access it.

Friend Jason suggested a means of using a struct pointer to access the underlying uint8_t array:

uint8_t data [ 4 ]; struct ad9837_ctrl_reg * dds_control = data ; InitCtrlAD9837 ( dds_control );

I will admit that it’s elegant, but also makes me anxious - in no small part because I feel it violates Kernighan’s law. (I am definitely not learned enough in C to debug this super effectively.) Additionally, the compiler un-shyly throws a warning here (in typically un-shy compiler fashion):

Src/main.c:160:41: warning: initialization of 'struct ad9837_ctrl_reg *' from incompatible pointer type 'uint8_t *' { aka 'unsigned char *' } [ -Wincompatible-pointer-types ] 160 | struct ad9837_ctrl_reg * dds_control = data ;

Also kind of wondering if this isn’t overloading the function call a bit. The dds_control struct is really just a nice way of letting a human understand the bit setting/clearing quickly and easily. The actual hardware (and the HAL) expects a nice array of uint8_t’s to write out of the peripheral onto the SPI bus. One possible solution - pass a pointer to data to each function (e.g. StartOutput(uint8_t *data);), and then point to it like it’s a struct of dds_control Allows you to only pass one argument, but still gives you the ability to set/clear bits in a nice human readable way



Feb 21 2020

No progress on code today - had a very human bout of insomnia that I compensated for by shutting off my alarm, sleeping in, and being late to work. (Oops.)

Got an email from CircuitHub - boards have been assembled, and are en route! They should be here Monday!! Here’s a picture!!!

Feb 20 2020

Added a nice little state machine that just toggles between a sine output and no output.

Also wrote a bit of next state logic that can be expanded out into a Mealy machine once we get some more possible inputs.

Starting to write a SetWaveformMode() function - going to need to stash another variable here somewhere to store what the current output state is. Need a variable to store that, because we need to know if the DAC is running or not.

Created a little struct that’s bit-packed to map to the DDS’s control register. I need to map this into a uint8_t array to write out to SPI now. How do I do that? It’d be nice to use gdb to examine how the struct is packed so I know how to bit shift it into the single byte SPI char array. I can print dds_control in gdb, and I can x &dds_control to see the address, but I don’t know a way to see the underlying bytes that dds_control is stored in.



Feb 19 2020

Rewrote the reset/init code of the AD9837

Instead of a hard-coded 250Hz wave, it now has separate function calls for starting output, stopping output, and setting the Freq0 register value Note: will need to update the Freq0 register settings so as not to overwrite other values in that register

Will be needing some sort of mild state machine to manage waveforms and switching logic soon.

Will also need (or at least would really like) some form of UI so I don’t need to re-flash the board whenever I want to make a dumb code change.

Feb 18 2020

After some twiddling and breadboard setup - it’s working! At least, a little bit.

Used ADI App Note AN-1070 to get a jumpstart on configuring registers for the AD9837. Took a bit of futzing around.

Originally, I noted that the output frequency was very high - way higher than I’d set it. Some digging revealed a set of bits that were reversed. Fixing this cleared things up in a jiffy.

Still not 100% perfect - I used the App note values, which assumed a 25MHz reference clock instead of the 16MHz I’m using on this Minigen eval kit from Sparkfun. That’s just math, though. Progress!

Also - this value updates fast in the ADC.

Feb 17 2020

Technically not working today - I took a long weekend trip to NH to go skiing. No real progress for Monday.

…though I did get an email from the folks at CircuitHub, who kindly flagged my order as having a faulty hanging net. Whoops. I rerouted the power plane somewhere else, and forgot to clear one of my dangling traces. It shouldn’t have a negative effect on the electronics - it’s just embarrassing.

Feb 14 2020 (Later in the Day)