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More Functionality With Real Time Pin Reconfiguration

Complete Pinout Remap on 8bit

How flexible pin mapping can help you

It is common to have resource conflicts when designing with Microcontrollers. It could be memory, I/O ports or any other constrained resources which often leads to having to choose a more expensive device with a larger package. I face a similar situation using the EFM8 Sleepy Bee (SB1) but the flexible pin mapping of the SB1 will greatly help solve my problem.

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I need the 4-wire SPI port for the memory LCD as well as an off board transceiver. However, they were each hardwired to different ports on the SB1. If I were to design the board from scratch I could have used a chip select to share the SPI port with other peripherals. However, I don’t have that luxury because I am using off the shelf hardware so my ports are hardwired and there is no changing them. After some head scratching and documentation reading, I learned that it’s quite easy and useful to reconfigure the pins of the SB1 MCU in real time making it possible to quickly switch which peripheral you wish to communicate with.

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The Configurator File

The tool that comes free from Silicon Labs is Simplicity Studio. The tool is used on most of the Silicon Labs MCUs. Simplicity Studio is very similar to other IDEs and from it you can manage your projects, write code and debug. For each project you can make a configurator file like the one below. 

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In the configurator you can set certain states almost like a Mealy/Moore state machine. Once the states are created you can alter the pin configuration for each state. The two states that I will use are the SPI_Config_1 and SPI_Config_2. 

Configuring the Pins

The image below compares the pins for SPI_Config_1, on the left, and SPI_Config_2 on the right. As you can see, the LCD which is SPI_Config_1, is hooked up to port 0 pins 6 and 7 as well as port 1 pins 0 and 1. For the radio I have port 0 pins 2, 3, 4 and 5 routed.

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 Each pin has many options for how it can be configured including its drive strength and type of input/output. All of these are altered and selected by a drop down menu in Simplicity Studio and are easy to configure. In the case of SPI0_NSS (slave select) on port 1 pin 1, the drive strength is high and is set to be a digital push-pull output, the rest are left as default.

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Generated Code

Once you set up the pin configuration and save the project, Simplicity Studio will automatically generate code to enable those pins as you specified. The code is in a file called InitDevice.c in the form of functions that move from state to state.

In my project one of the functions is PORTS_0_enter_SPI_Config_2_from_DefaultMode(). This function configures the port 0 pins for SPI_Config_2 coming from DefaultMode by turning off and on pins as well as configuring them to the specifications in SPI_Config_2.

You can connect any states with one or two-way transitions. For each transition and port the configurator will automatically generate these functions. All you have to do is call these functions whenever you want to alter the configurations. With these functions I will can flow from state to state outlined below.

My code flow:

• Load something onto the LCD while in the SPI_Config_1 state

• Call the transition function to go back to DefaultMode

• Call the function to go to SPI_Config_2.

• Send a command to the radio

• Go back to SPI_Config_1 and repeat

I could most likely do this without the use of the default state but for educational purposes, this approach worked. Simplicity Studio will not generate any redundant code, so if you keep pin functionality constant between states, it will not reconfigure them again to the same thing. Below is an example of the generated code which sets bits in the registers to configure the pins.

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 This application is a very simple example but you can imagine the usefulness and power of this real time reconfiguration. I could communicate with a number of peripherals, the only limit is speed as the more devices hooked up the more switching required and the longer a complete cycle of communication will be. While re-configuring might not be as efficient as each peripheral being on the same 3-wire SPI with individual selects it still allows a lot of freedom in designing the supporting hardware. This would be very useful for replacing old MCUs because a board redesign wouldn't be needed.

Below are links for all the components and tools that I used:

EFM8 kits 

Wireless Transceivers

Simplicity Studio

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