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Getting shared GPIO serial right, and other nuts to crack

A project log for eForth for cheap STM8S gadgets

Turn cheap modules from AliExpress into interactive development kits!

thomasThomas 01/19/2017 at 06:510 Comments

If you're following this little project you may have noticed that I take pride in adjusting the code for supporting almost any type of cheap STM8S Value Line device.

Here is a number of constraints:

  1. in most cases UART pins are not broken out
  2. in some cases UART pins are used for communication
  3. in most cases there is no accessible "unused" GPIO
  4. in some cases there is no ICP connector, PD1 is used, and NRST isn't accessible

I did the following to meet constraints 1. and 2.:

However, I'm still working on some edge cases constraint 3:

I'm working on a solution that doesn't lead to much entanglement between communication and board support code. I'd like to restrict it to cases where the "background task" option is enabled.

Constraint 4 is a bit more complicated to meet as I learned yesterday:

I've got it working in cases where PD1/SWIM is used for digits or segments of the 7S/LED display even if it's not used for the serial communication code (where the constraint is implicitly met).

Anther thing I've been working on is the code density of Forth user code: having literals (constants, addresses) in STC (subroutine threaded code) is quite expensive: a call to DOLIT followed by a 16 bit constant, that's 5 bytes. In the core code I got that down to 4, 3, 2, or even 1 bytes in many cases (CALLR DOLIT for 16 bit, CALLR DOLITC for 8bit constants, and LDW Y,#W and LD A,#C, or CLRW Y and CLR A with TOS in a register). This method contributes to quite some binary size reduction in the core, but it can't be used easily in user code (one work around is to use words like "0" for frequently used constants).

I now experimented with the STM8 TRAP instruction to build a native DOLIT which is just TRAP MSB LSB. It works nicely, but it takes 3 µs to execute. An 80's programmer would have been happy with that, but today it's a "size over speed" decision.

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