Devlog 16 Initializing Uart Pt3
December 8, 2022
Log 16
I’m aiming to complete the UART and GPIO initialization in this session.
Initializing UART pt3
Last time, we enabled the clocks and set the baud rate. Now we’ll look at setting up the mode bits. We know the USART0 mode settings are in the Control registers at address 0x4001 3800 at offsets 0x0C, 0x10, and 0x14, and we don’t need to read them first because we always want to overwrite the UART configuration when we initialize it - discarding any previously configured settings.
We’ll start by configuring Control register 1, which sets the Stop bits to 1:
li t1, (0 << 12) | (0 << 13) # set STB (bits 12 and 13) to 00 (1 stop bit)
sw t1, 0x10(t0) # store the value in the USART Control register 1 (USART_CTL1)
Technically it’s not necessary since the default is 00 on reset. But this makes sure it’ll always be 00 during init, in the event it was previously configured to something else (not on reset).
Next we’ll disable hardware flow control, half-duplex, etc in Control register 2:
sw zero, 0x14(t0) # store the value in the USART Control register 2 (USART_CTL2)
Finally we’ll configure Control register 0, which enables the Receiver, Transmitter, and USART:
li t1, (1 << 2) | (1 << 3) | (1 << 13) # set REN (bit 2), TEN (bit 3), UEN (bit 13)
sw t1, 0x0C(t0) # store the value in the USART Control register 0 (USART_CTL0)
uart_done:
ret
Now let’s examine the registers in memory to see if it’s all set accordingly. We’ll only look at the first 16 bits because the rest are all reserved bits:
(gdb) x/th 0x40013800+0x10
0x40013810: 0000000000000000
(gdb) x/th 0x40013800+0x14
0x40013814: 0000000000000000
(gdb) x/th 0x40013800+0x0C
0x4001380c: 0010000000001100
OK! That’s exactly what we wanted. I know some might think there’s some un-necessary initialization code here, but we have to remember that UART init might not always/only occur when the device is reset. I want to keep the door open for reinitializing it with different settings in the future, without requiring much head-scratching or code changes.
Configuring GPIO
Now I want to configure the GPIO pins to handle RX/TX. We’re using pins 9 (TX) and 10 (RX) on the GPIO port A. Their configuration is stored at address 0x4001 0800 at offset 0x04. First we’ll load the current values from memory:
gpio_init:
# configure TX on pin 9 of port A (0b0011)
li t0, 0x40010800 # load base address of GPIOA
lw t1, 0x04(t0) # load value from the Port control register 1 (GPIOA_CTL1)
Then we’ll need to define a bitmask to clear the bits we want to modify, and we’ll clear them:
li t2, 0xfffff00f # load bitmask to clear 8 bits (MD9[1:0],CTL9[1:0],MD10[1:0],CTL10[1:0])
and t1, t1, t2 # clear the bits (TX 4,5,6,7) and (RX 8,9,10,11)
That sets 8 bits to 0, the 8 bits used to configure and set the mode of the RX/TX pins. Next I do something a bit weird, but again it’s somewhat future-proofing the Assembly code:
or t1, t1, (1 << 4) | (1 << 5) | (0 << 6) | (0 << 7) # set the bits 4,5,6,7 (output push-pull, max speed 50MHz)
This sets the 4 bits for TX to 0 or 1 depending on the setting we want. I’m looking to set it to 0b0011, there the two least significant bits are 1 and 1 (from the right). In the future it’ll be easy to change those configs and modes by simply changing the 0 or 1 values above.
Next we dosomething similar for RX, except it’s configured with slightly higher values so they can’t be used as an immidate. This means we’ll need to store it in a register before applying it. The value to store is 0b0100 where the first two least significant bits are 0 and 0 (from the right):
# configure RX on pin 10 of port A (0b0100)
li t2, (0 << 8) | (0 << 9) | (1 << 10) | (0 << 11) # load the bits 8,9,10,11
or t1, t1, t2 # set the bits 8,9,10,11 (input floating, mode)
sw t1, 0x04(t0) # store the value in the Port control register 1 (GPIOA_CTL1)
gpio_done:
ret
The final line stores the entire 32-bit value back into the register, and our USART GPIO pins should be fully configured now. We can examine the low 16-bits value in memory:
(gdb) x/th 0x40010800+0x04
0x40010804: 0100010000110100
Let’s cleanup the formatting there:
0100 0100 0011 0100
We can see bits 4 and 5 are set to 1, as expected, and bit 10 is also set to 1. The other values remain unchanged since we performed a bitwise OR to store them.
Closing thoughts
Well that was somewhat less exciting than I expected. I’m happy the USART and GPIO are fully configured, but I still don’t know if it’s correct until I actually try to communicate over the UART. I’ll reserve that for the next session though.