Description
Objectives of this assignment
• Use multiple AVR 16-bit timers.
• Write interrupt handlers for two timers.
• Output a representation of program state onto the Arduino mega2560
board’s 2×16 LCD display.
• Practice with writing code the implements (and using functions that depend
upon) the parameter-passing mechanism based on stack frames.
Interrupts, LCD panel
In this assignment you will use two features of the Arduino boards that have been
introduced recently in lab: interrupts and the use of the 2×16 LCD display. The
handlers required for the assignment will not be particularly complex, but they
must work precisely. (Their execution will be triggered by several of the board’s
timers.) The LCD panel will finally allow you to create board behavior that is richer
than simply turning LEDs on and off; the labs earlier this semester introduced you
to the LCD panel and to interrupts.
A big challenge of this assignment, however, is that you are now moving into an area
of programming where our debugger is of very little help. When handlers are not
correctly coded or configured, the result is a mute board. Hence it is crucial you not
only complete this assignment in the order of the four parts listed, but also build
upon each of the completed parts by coding with successive projects folders. The
idea here is that even if you struggled with part D, your success with parts A, B and C
will be in those completed project folders for those parts (i.e., the code for those
earlier parts can still run successfully).
A brief demonstration illustrating the behavior for each of the parts can be seen in
this video:
As stated earlier, this assignment is in four parts, ordered from easier to more
difficult, with each later part building upon the work of the previous parts.
A. Write code to show on the LCD panel whether or not a button is currently
being pressed.
B. Write code to show on the LCD panel which of four buttons (left, up, down,
right) is either being pressed, or if there is no button being pressed, which
button was last pressed.
C. Write code to permit the use of the “up” and “down” buttons to set a
hexadecimal digit at the top-left of the LCD display.
D. Write code to extend your work in Part C such that using the “right” and “left”
buttons will permit the “up”/”down” buttons to work in a different part of
the display’s top row.
The ZIP file distributed with this assignment contains four directories, each
consisting of a Microchip Studio project. Directory a3part-A/ is meant for part A,
a3part-B/ is for part B, etc. In directory is an A#3 starter file in which you are to
write your solution for that particular part of the assignment. (Note every directory
starts out with exactly the same file contents.) The idea is that as your work
progresses from part to part, you can copy working code from one Microchip Studio
project to the next. In that way, if a later part is not finished or does not work, it will
not interfere with your working solution to an earlier part.
Part A: Button press
After completing this part, your Arduino board’s LCD display will appear have the
following display when no button is being pressed:
and the following display when any button is being pressed:
and this behavior continues as long as the Arduino runs your program.
This semester in lab 4 you examined the way an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC)
is used to read buttons on the Arduino board. The ADC obtains a value from 0 to
1023 from the buttons – if the value is greater than 900, then no button on the LCD
shield is being pushed. Code from lab 4 helped you explore how you might write
code to detect which button is pressed; polling loops were an important part of your
solutions.
Interrupts could help us here to detect ADC events, but not necessarily in the way
we expect. It would be tempting to have a solution where a button press itself
results causes an interrupt. However, in practice this is rarely done because of an
electrical phenomenon known bouncing.
Consider the figure below (found at http://bit.ly/2IdyYRg):
This is a screengrab from an oscilloscope (if you’ve never heard of these, visit
http://bit.ly/1RXdkgw for a description) showing the electrical behavior of a
Page 4 of 8
button being pressed. The signal does not clearly go from voltage low to voltage
high, but goes up and down quickly before settling to a high voltage; we say that the
voltage bounces (i.e., like a rubber ball being bounced by a schoolchild on a
playground).
The diagram shows that in the space of two milliseconds, a button
being pressed actually appears to the computer as if the button were rapidly
pressed a dozen or so times. Therefore, if we used an interrupt to detect when a
button caused the voltage to go high, then we would have too many interrupts for a
single button press. So, in practice designers implement debouncing, usually in
hardware. Our Arduino boards already perform some debouncing on the buttons,
but still not enough for our purposes.
What we will use instead is a timer to sample the value of the ADC at specific
intervals (in our case, timer1 set at 10 milliseconds). Every time the interrupt
handler for timer1 is executed, its code must determine whether or not a button is
currently being pressed. If this is the case, then a value of 1 is stored in
BUTTON_IS_PRESSED (i.e., see the .dseg at the end of the assembler file); otherwise
a value of 0 is stored in this location.
So far this description indicates the need for one timer (i.e., one with a duration of
0.01 seconds). But how then is the LCD panel updated to reflect the button state (i.e.
either a “-” or “*” character at the lower-left corner)? Unfortunately, the interrupt
handler for timer1 itself must never call the LCD routines! In fact, no interrupt
handler is able to call LCD code. So, if the handler is not permitted1 to call
lcd_gotoxy and lcd_putchar, how do we update the display?
The answer: Use another timer in main program but make use of it via a polling
technique. This additional timer (timer3 in your program) goes off every 100
milliseconds. When the polling loop detects timer3 has reached its TOP value (i.e.,
100 ms has occurred), then the code for updating the LCD display can be executed.
The latter code will determine whether “-” or “*” or should appear in the area of the
LCD to indicate the button-press state. It is perfectly legitimate to re-write repeatedly
the same characters in the same locations on the LCD!
Reminder: timer3 does not use an interrupt handler!
1 My use of the phrase “is not permitted” is a bit strong. In fact, the assembler will
not forbid us from calling the LCD routines from an interrupt handler. However,
once the program calls such routines from a handler, the whole program will simply
stop working. In general, it is a Very Bad Idea for an interrupt handler to call other
routines, especially because we cannot always be guaranteed those routines
themselves do not depend upon interrupts. The one exception here is the code I’ve
provided to you in a function named compare_words.
Part B: “What button was pressed?”
(This part will be based on your solution to part A. That is, the code within your
a3part-B.asm will use code you have copied-and-pasted from a3part-A.asm).
In lab 4 you may have done a little bit more with buttons – in fact, you may have
even had an opportunity to write code to determine precisely which button is
pressed.
The ADC obtains a value from 0 to 1023 from that represent button states –
if the value is greater than 900, then definitely no button is being pushed. (All of the
comments earlier in part A regarding “noise” and “bouncing” are especially
important here.) The ranges for all buttons on our LCD/button shields are
maddingly inexact and may require a bit of tweaking and tuning, but they can be
described roughly as follows:
• from 0 to around 50: “right” button2
• from around 50 to around 176: “up” button
• from around 176 to around 352: “down” button
• from around 352 to around 555: “left” button
• from around 555 to around 800: “select” button
• above 900: no button is pressed
For this assignment we will use “left”, “down”, “up”, and “right” buttons (i.e. we’ll
ignore “select”). The LCD will display along the bottom row either the current
button being pressed, or if no button is being pressed, the last button to be pressed.
Button-letter-to-LCD mappings are to be as shown below:
Although the diagram above shows all button letters, in practice only one letter will
be shown at any one time. (At the start of the program, no letter needs appear as no
button will have yet be pressed; this will be the only situation where no letter
appears in the lower-left area of the display.)
Therefore, in order to complete this part of the assignment you will need to modify
both the handler for timer1 and also the LCD-update loop that is in your code
driven by timer3. The button pressed must be stored in LAST_BUTTON_PRESSED (in
the .dseg area at the bottom of the assembly file); that is, timer1 will
“communicate” with the timer3 loop via sharing this region of memory.
And do not be too disturbed by the “bouncing” you see when you write your code.
Sometimes a button press will result in some other letter showing up on the display.
This can be avoided either by shorter presses or longer presses. You may be able to
reduce the occurrence of this by tweaking the range values given above for buttons
2 There is a typo on many of the boards in the lab that spells this as “RIGTH”.
and the ACD reading. Regardless, if such “bouncing” is the exception and not the
norm, then you are on the right track with your work. Perfection is hard to achieve
here and is not expected.
Part C: Setting a hexadecimal digit on the LCD top row
(This part will be based on code you have written for parts A and B. That is, the code
within your a3part3-C.asm will use code you wrote for a3part2-B.asm).
Now that you can determine which of the directional letters has been pressed, you
will use this for setting a hexadecimal digit that appears at the upper-left hand
corner of the LCD display:
To do this, the “up” and “down” buttons will be used – “up” to move from a smaller
hex digit to a larger, and “down” to move from larger hex digit to a smaller. At the
bottom of the assembly file you will see:
AVAILABLE_CHARSET: .db “0123456789abcdef_”, 0
which you must use to move “up” (i.e. from left-to-right in the sequence) and “down”
(i.e. from right-to-left in the sequence”). Notice too that there is a special character
at the end that is not a digit (“_”) and that the sequence is actually a string as it is
null terminated.
Your code must not hard-code the length of the sequence
string – that is, it must be possible to place a difference sequence in the assembly
code (i.e. some other sequence of letters / numbers / characters), such that this
different set of characters can be selected when the program is re-assembled and rerun.
The rate at which the letter can be changed needs to be controlled, however, and
that is accomplished by using timer4 which raises an interrupt twice a second (i.e.
every 500 milliseconds). That is, this handler will use other state maintained by the
other handlers / loops to update these three memory areas in .dseg:
• TOP_LINE_CONTENT which is 16 bytes in length and is to be read by the
timer3 loop (i.e. calls to lcd_putchar for the top row, amongst other calls).
This must be initialized with space characters.
• CURRENT_CHARSET_INDEX which is 16 bytes in length and where its first
location will hold the index/offset into AVAILABLE_CHARSET that resulted
from the last up/down button press. For example, if the digit ‘d’ appears in
the top-left corner of the display, then the byte at CURRENT_CHARSET_INDEX
will hold the value 13 as a result of your implementation.
• CURRENT_CHAR_INDEX can be ignored for this Part C, but its implied value
here is zero (0).
Remember that the timer3 loop is the only code permitted to call LCD routines.
Part D: Setting other hexadecimal digits on the LCD top row
(This part will be based on the code you have written for the previous parts. That is,
the code within your a3part-D.asm will use code you wrote for a3part-C.asm).
The last part of this assignment is to add behavior to the “right” and “left” buttons so
that other hex digits on the LCD’s top row may be set.
This will involve adding extra functionality to the timer4 handler, and hopefully will
require only minimal modifications to your timer3 polling loop. The memory
regions introduced in Part C must be used for these purposes (i.e. there are 16 chars
on the top row of the LCD, there are 16 byte locations in both TOP_LINE_CONTENT
and there are 16 byte locations CURRENT_CHARSET_INDEX).
You may find that pressing the “right” and “left” buttons result in top-row spots
being missed. In the same spirit as what was mentioned above regarding the effects
of “bouncing” for Part B, as long as this behavior is the exception and not the norm,
you’re on the right track with your programming.
Summing up …
By the time you are completed work for all parts of this assignment, you will have –
in essence3 – accomplished the following:
• For timer1: The handler will examine the ADC for button-presses every 10
milliseconds, writing correct values into the BUTTON_IS_PRESSED and
LAST_BUTTON_PRESSED memory areas.
• For timer4: The handler will examine the values in BUTTON_IS_PRESSED
and LAST_BUTTON_PRESSED every 0.5 seconds in order read and write
memory areas CURRENT_CHARSET_INDEX, CURRENT_CHAR_INDEX, and
possibly TOP_LINE_CONTENT.
• For timer3: The polling loop will examine the values in the five memory
areas (listed in the two bullet points above) every 100 milliseconds. The
3
code in this loop will make the appropriate calls to lcd_gotoxy and
lcd_putchar to ensure the LCD display represents that state of the program.
You may simply “redraw” the entire LCD display every 100 milliseconds; and
that frequency, there is very little (if any) flicker.
What you must submit
• Your four completed parts: a3part-A.asm, a3part-B.asm, a3part-C.asm
and a3part-D.asm. Do not change the name of these files! Do not submit
the LCD files. Submit only the .asm files listed above!
• Your work must use the provided skeleton files. Any other kinds of solutions
will not be accepted.
Evaluation
• 6 marks: Solution for part A
• 5 marks: solution for part B
• 5 marks: solution for part C
• 4 marks: solution for part D
Therefore, the total mark for this assignment is 20.
Some of the evaluations above will also take into account whether or not submitted
code is properly formatted (i.e., indenting and commenting are suitably used), and
the file correctly named.
In contrast to previous assignments, Assignment #3 will be assessed
through a live code demonstration. In this process, each student will have
the opportunity to meet with a member of the teaching team. These
instructors will review the code submitted by the student and engage in a
discussion about their work during the lab session scheduled for the week
following the Assignment #3 deadline.
