How far we've come... Full speed CAN traffic!

In the last post I presented the new object organization. In the end we had to move responsibilities around (amongst cogs) in order to get the system to be as responsive as we needed. I started with simple symmetry and had to abandon it. At some level this surprised me, but our goals had to be met, so here we are.

In this post I've a bunch of waveforms to present. The good news is that each zooms in on a rather simple observation so there is not much detail to each of them but the resulting behavior is too fun to not show.

To the right is an overview of a Bus Census with something you haven't seen here before. This is the Census being transmitted from PropCAN (as directed by the host software, CDNC) and fifteen, yes 15!, CAN Nodes all eagerly responding. Do you see what happened? Remembering the last post we saw that we couldn't handle 5 nodes responding, but look at this. Here we have 15 nodes all responding as fast as the CAN Bus will allow and the new SPI Engine receive side is so fast that we never even needed our 2nd receive buffer. The /Rx0BF line (bright green, near top) show the signal being asserted and then our SPI Engine back-end Cog is so fast that we empty the buffer while we are still receiving the next message. It is wonderful to see an idea pan out, isn't it? Let's quickly walk thru a few significant parts of this traffic which we'll do by presenting four more pictures.

In this next picture I've zoomed in on the asserting of the /Rx0BF line (buffer full for the 1st message to arrive.) I've placed markers M1 and M2 at the time buffer full is signaled and at the time our Rx-side begins to send the buffer unload command. I've placed a time interval measurement label at the top left. We can clearly see that M1 to M2 = 1.655 uSeconds (or 33 assembly instructions.) Our SPI Rx back-end Cog was in a loop deciding what needed to be done next when it saw the /Rx0BF line being asserted at which time it formulated the command to unload the interrupting buffer and initiated sending the command via SPI. Not a bad response time.

As long as we have this view, let's look around. The other waveforms quickly show us the relative speeds of each of the communication happening at the same time as our unload. From top to bottom, we see the SPI CLK signal showing us our SPI Write speed as we see the command to unload the buffer being sent to the CAN controller (MCP 2515). Below the SPI CLK we see the SPItoCAN which is our command data being sent and below that is the SPIfmCAN signal which is data returning from the 2515 (our received message arriving). Finally, at the bottom we see 2515-CAN Rx toggling. This is our next CAN Message arriving while this buffer unload is occurring. Compared to our SPI Tx and Rx rates the CAN bits seem pretty slow. We remember that our CAN rate is 800,000 bits/second. What is our new SPI Tx/Rx rate? Let's look at our next picture to see.

In this next picture we've shifted to the right along our unload so that we can clearly see the SPI Tx and SPI Rx bit rates. The code is asymmetrical for the similar reasons that our Serial Rx and Tx turned out to be asymmetrical. The work we are doing is different for the two sides of the effort. Anyway, I've placed two markers for Tx and two more for Rx and I've placed two measurements for each which tell us the duration and bit-rate that we are now seeing. Let's look at them.

Markers M1 and M2 are spanning a single byte write from the Propeller to the MCP 2515 device. At the top we see that this write is 350 nSec long, resulting in a 2.857M bits/second (bps) SPI transmit rate. On the receive side, Markers M3 and M4 bracket a single byte being received. The duration of this byte is 255 nSeconds and the resulting bit-rate is 3.922M bps. We are commanding the CAN device at nearly 3M bps and receiving data at nearly 4M bps. If you remember our performance criteria we set for ourselves these speeds are better than we needed to meet our goals. At this rate, and since we are getting it done during the receive of our next CAN message just how fast are we unloading the receive buffer from the MCP 2515?

In this fourth picture I've zoomed back out a bit so that we can see the entire unload. I've placed new markers (M5 and M6) along with a new interval measurement. M5 is at the start if the first received byte while M6 is placed at the end of the last byte emptied from the receive buffer. The interval measurement shows that we are unloading the buffer in 29.89 uSeconds. Finally, just shortly after the last byte is read, the /CS is de-asserted and the /Rx0BF is also de-asserted which happens automatically when we unload (read) the receive buffer. Now, lets zoom out one last time to look at the full transaction again but let's zoom far enough to see the serial transmitting of the messages to the connected PC via USB.

Here in this final picture you can see the overhead of handing off the messages between cogs and finally getting sent over USB as the dominating feature of the waveform. You can see what I mean when you see that all of our 16 CAN messages (1 outbound, 15 in-bound responses) are gathered in the colorful burst at the left of our waveforms. Then, spread out, over the remainder of the picture to the right of the burst we see the yellow message transmits over serial from the Propeller to the FTDI chip to be sent over USB to our PC. While each message is very fast (the yellow burst is narrow) there is a lot of dead time between each message. Depending upon the rate of messages arriving via CAN this could spell doom for our system if we don't have enough buffering to handle the majority case. That is enough space in the Rx Queue so that we can place arriving message from CAN into the Rx Queue and then hold them there until they are sent via serial to the FTDI chip and the entry in the Rx Queue then freed up for use by another arriving CAN message.

So, in the end, we've got system that's performing much better and so far is meeting our basic performance specifications. Now it's time to move on to quantifying the performance of PropCAN under normal system loads and with normal traffic patterns. We're almost there!