Supernight 5050 RGB LED string teardown

I've been having fun with this RGB LED string from Amazon with 300 5050 LEDs in a 16.4ft string.

One bug: after using it for a few minutes, it seems to have swapped the red and green columns of colored buttons: red displays green and green displays red.  The controller is nonvolatile: it remembers settings across powerdowns.

I set the controller to white (W button) full brightness and powered it with a bench supply.  I went as high as 13.8V since that's typical for a running car, and they know people will put them in their cars.  I briefly ran it upwards of 15V and it didn't immediately die, drawing about 3A.

The color temperature changes with applied voltage, going from yellow at lower voltages to very blue at high voltages.

The red LED first barely comes on at 5V 10mA.  The blue LED is last to come on, at around 9V 0.85A (so looks like you could power the string from a 9V battery) .  At 10V it draws 1.19A.  At 11.0V, it draws 1.56A.  At 12V it draws 1.96A.  At 13V it draws 2.33A, and at 13.8V it draws 2.65A.

At 12V and max brightness with just one color lit, red draws 1.17A, green draws 0.95A and blue draws 0.87A.

The output of the controller has 4 pins: White, Green, Red, Blue.  White connects to the positive rail (12V) and the three color channels are pulled down toward ground with PWM.  Each PWM channel supports 8 brightness levels if you've pushed one of the colored buttons.

If you press one of the DIY buttons, though, you get 64 levels per color.

PWM period is 4.1ms (244Hz frequency).

Under the hood, the heavy lifting is done by a trio of 70T03GH MOSFETs.  The microcontroller has no markings.  The remaining IC is a 24C02 EEPROM.

Here's an amusing aside: observe the wire harness in the top right of the photo below, which feeds the LED strip.  The LED strip's wires are colored white (12v), R, G, B, as expected.  But in the cable coming from the board: 12v is black instead of white, the green channel is a red wire marked B (but ever since my controller glitched, it's actually red), the red channel is a red wire marked G (but is actually green), and the blue channel is a blue wire marked R (and is actually blue).  So I bet the glitch I observed is part of a broader bug in which the controller flips around its channels, and which the manufacturer kept trying to fix by changing the order of wires in the harness.

The IR signal from the remote is received by an integrated IR receiver that produces serial for the microcontroller.  Normally high (5V), it pulls low for about 9ms for a start bit, back to high for 4ms, then sends data bits.  The data bits look to me like an RTZ code: high 600us, then high or low for 600us (depending on the data bit), then high 600us, then low 600us.  Looks like about 24 data bits.

BeagleBone to Android via USB Serial

As I mentioned in my last post, BeagleBone uses the Linux g_multi kernel module so that when you plug it into a PC, it appears to be a USB hub with USB-serial, USB-ethernet and USB storage devices attached.

In the other post I talk about how to plug a BeagleBone into an Android phone via USB and communicate between them using Ethernet.  Unfortunately it requires shutting off Wifi and cellular data.

So instead, I investigated communicating via USB serial instead of USB ethernet.  It should work out of the box, but none of the dozens of Android apps I tried could find the USB Serial device the BeagleBone provided.

Thus I used the same trick as before, replacing g_multi with a single-purpose device.  As in the last post, you'll have to comment out a big block of shell script in /opt/scripts/boot/am335x_evm.sh.

Then, instead of adding "modprobe g_cdc ${g_network}" and "usb0=enable" to explicitly load the USB Ethernet CDC driver, add:

modprobe g_serial

ttyGS0="enable"

When you reboot, you won't be able to "ssh 192.168.7.2" from your PC anymore.  Instead, you'll only get /dev/ttyACM0, and you'll need to login using a terminal emulator like minicom or screen.

(As before, you may want to make these changes while booting from a microSD card so that you can just pop the card out if it doesn't work).

After verifying that I could get in from my workstation, I connected my phone to the BeagleBone with an OTG adapter (careful!  Not all of them work right), then used the "Android USB Serial Monitor Lite" to connect to the BeagleBone.  (Open the "three dots" menu and select "Open Device", then send a newline and you should get a login prompt).

Connecting BeagleBone to newer Android Nexus phones (like Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P) via USB Ethernet

Update: Huh, I just discovered that this exists: Settings > developer options > networking > select USB configuration > RNDIS (USB ethernet).  But it doesn't seem to work.  So I suspect the RNDIS option there doesn't actually do anything.

The BeagleBone comes with a neat feature: when you plug it into your computer's USB port, the BeagleBone pretends it is a USB hub connected to several things: a serial port, USB storage and an ethernet adapter.  Thus you can point your PC's browser to http://192.168.7.2 and pull up the BeagleBone's built-in webserver, login via /dev/ttyACM0, or look through the files on its boot partition.

This all happens thanks to the g_multi Linux kernel module, which is one of several modules that allow devices with USB OTG ports to pretend to have things like storage, serial ports, ethernet and even MIDI ports.  g_multi aggregates a bunch of those together and presents them all to the host under a virtual USB hub.

This works great when connecting the BeagleBone to my Linux workstation over USB, and it also partly works when I connect the BeagleBone to my (stock) Nexus 5X: I can attach the BeagleBone to the phone using this VicTsing OTG adapter, and the BeagleBone will power itself from the phone and let me browse its USB storage.

I haven't had any success with the serial port, unfortunately.  I tried a bunch of different Android serial apps, and the phone seems to realize that the BeagleBone is offering a serial port, but I can't get any data between the devices.

Ethernet: if you want to talk from your Android phone to your beaglebone via TCP/IP over the USB cable, the first thing you'll have to do is, sadly, turn on airplane mode so that cellular and wifi data are disabled.  If one of those interfaces is active, pings and HTTP requests no longer make it to the BeagleBone.

Here's the other issue: recent phones like the Nexus 6P have a smaller set of USB Ethernet drivers enabled in the stock distro.  So with the BeagleBone in its default configuration, the Nexus 5X sees the ethernet interface just fine, but the Nexus 6P doesn't.

Fortunately, the g_multi can pretend to be one of two different *types* of USB Ethernet device.  The default is RNDIS, which apparently is a common thing on Windows, and is one of the drivers that got removed on the Nexus 6P.  The other is CDC, which is apparently a cleaner standard that manufacturers of USB Ethernet adapters can follow (so that each manufacturer doesn't have to invent their own driver interface).

Annoyingly, I can't find docs on g_multi's module parameters anywhere.  But I did manage to switch my BeagleBone from RNDIS to CDC ethernet with this change to /opt/scripts/boot/am335x_evm.sh.

As you can see, I just commented out the block of code that decides how to load g_multi, and instead I load the standalone g_cdc CDC Ethernet driver.  (This means you'll no longer get the USB storage and serial interfaces):

 # Added these two lines:  
 modprobe g_cdc ${g_network}  
 usb0=enable  
   
 # And commented out this big block:  
 ##g_multi: Do we have image file?  
 #if [ -f ${usb_image_file} ] ; then  
 #    modprobe g_multi file=${usb_image_file} cdrom=0 ro=0 stall=0 removable=1 nofua=1 ${g_network} || true  
 #    usb0="enable"  
 #    ttyGS0="enable"  
 #else  
 #    #g_multi: Do we have a non-rootfs "fat" partition?  
 #    unset root_drive  
 #    root_drive="$(cat /proc/cmdline | sed 's/ /\n/g' | grep root=UUID= | awk -F 'root=' '{print $2}' || true)"  
 #    if [ ! "x${root_drive}" = "x" ] ; then  
 #        root_drive="$(/sbin/findfs ${root_drive} || true)"  
 #    else  
 #        root_drive="$(cat /proc/cmdline | sed 's/ /\n/g' | grep root= | awk -F 'root=' '{print $2}' || true)"  
 #    fi  
 #  
 #    if [ "x${root_drive}" = "x/dev/mmcblk0p1" ] || [ "x${root_drive}" = "x/dev/mmcblk1p1" ] ; then  
 #        #g_ether: Do we have udhcpd/dnsmasq?  
 #        if [ -f /usr/sbin/udhcpd ] || [ -f /usr/sbin/dnsmasq ] ; then  
 #            modprobe g_ether ${g_network} || true  
 #            usb0="enable"  
 #        else  
 #            #g_serial: As a last resort...  
 #            modprobe g_serial || true  
 #            ttyGS0="enable"  
 #        fi  
 #    else  
 #        boot_drive="${root_drive%?}1"  
 #        modprobe g_multi file=${boot_drive} cdrom=0 ro=0 stall=0 removable=1 nofua=1 ${g_network} || true  
 #        usb0="enable"  
 #        ttyGS0="enable"  
 #    fi  
 #  
 #fi  
   

Be careful not to comment too much: you still want the "if [ "x${usb0}" = "xenable" ] " block below to be active so that the network interface gets set up correctly.

You might want to do all this while booted from a microSD card so that if you screw it up and can't access the BeagleBone over USB anymore, you can just pop out the card and fix am335x_evm.sh from your PC.

SeeedStudio Xadow with Ubuntu

Seems like every time I try to use the Xadow board, I have to spend hours getting it to program via the Arduino IDE.  This time, the solution seems to have been putting this in a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/78-xadow.rules and then rebooting:

ATTR{idVendor}=="2886",  ENV{ID_MM_DEVICE_IGNORE}="1"

Which GPIO pins work with Adafruit_BBIO

Working with the Beaglebone can be really frustrating.  There are a lot of buggy libraries and incomplete docs, and the Sitara chip is really complicated, overloading its pins to do lots of different things.

Today I needed 8 GPIO pins for a test harness.  I looked at the diagrams for the P8 and P9 headers and picked some likely-looking pins.  I used the Adafruit_BBIO python library and set them up as outputs, then toggled them and watched with the meter.  Three of them didn't work.

So I changed my script to try to toggle *all* the pins on P9, even the ground and VCC pins.  Of course this doesn't bother Adafruit_BBIO because it has no error checking (ugh).  Here are the pins that worked as GPIO outputs.

Note that this is from my Beaglebone *Green*.  On the Beaglebone *Black* you'd probably need to disable HDMI for some of these pins to work.

Beware: I repeated this test several times across reboot and power down, and some of the pins worked the second or third time that didn't work the first.  It's possible that's sloppiness on my part, but my intuition says no, and that Adafruit_BBIO isn't initializing the pins correctly, so there's some random chance at play.  The best reference I've found so far in how stuff actually works is "Exploring Beaglebone", which is unfortunately a non-free book, but very well written.

P8_7
P8_8
P8_9
P8_10
P8_11
P8_12
P8_13
P8_14
P8_15
P8_16
P8_17
P8_18
P8_19
P8_26
P8_27
P8_28
P8_29
P8_30
P8_31
P8_32
P8_33
P8_34
P8_35
P8_36
P8_37
P8_38
P8_39
P8_40
P8_41
P8_42
P8_43
P8_44
P8_45

P9_11
P9_12
P9_13
P9_14
P9_15
P9_16
P9_23
P9_24
P9_25
P9_26
P9_27
P9_28
P9_29
P9_30
P9_31
P9_41
P9_42

Adafruit_BBIO bugs

First bug was mine.  I was doing "import Adafruit_BBIO as GPIO" instead of "import Adafruit_BBIO.GPIO as GPIO".  That gave this error once I started trying to use it:

$ ./test.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./test.py", line 5, in <module>
    GPIO.setup("P9_11", GPIO.OUT)
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'setup'

The other bug was theirs: the code appeared to be working, but the GPIO pins weren't changing state.  Turns out there's no error checking in the library (ugh).  So it wasn't giving any errors when I failed to run the script as root.

Beaglebone black PWM minimum frequency

By trial and error, I just figured out that 1 billion is the longest period you can set for (at least this particular) PWM channel.

root@beaglebone:/sys/devices/ocp.3/pwm_test_P9_31.13# echo 1000000000 > period

root@beaglebone:/sys/devices/ocp.3/pwm_test_P9_31.13# echo 1000000001 > period 

bash: echo: write error: Numerical result out of range

The value is in nanoseconds, so that gives a minimum frequency of 1Hz for PWM on beaglebone black.

Also note that it won't let you set the period lower than the duty cycle setting (which we should really call the pulse width instead):

root@beaglebone:/sys/devices/ocp.3/pwm_test_P9_31.13# echo 2000 > duty

root@beaglebone:/sys/devices/ocp.3/pwm_test_P9_31.13# echo 1000 > period 

bash: echo: write error: Invalid argument

root@beaglebone:/sys/devices/ocp.3/pwm_test_P9_31.13# echo 500 > duty

root@beaglebone:/sys/devices/ocp.3/pwm_test_P9_31.13# echo 1000 > period 

Connect beaglebone black to android via USB OTG

With the right USB OTG cables, I was able to connect my Nexus 5X to a beaglebone black and a beaglebone green.  I had to try several cables before the beaglebone would power up; I suspect it's the USB-C adapter that's the most problematic.  This is the USB-C OTG cable that worked.

Once the board booted, I got a notification on my phone about the beaglebone USB storage device becoming available.  But I wanted to send data back and forth between an android app and a beaglebone process, so the network interface was the important thing to me.

When I connect the beaglebone to my PC, it shows up as a USB ethernet adapter, and I can talk to it at 192.168.7.2.  I downloaded an android app called "Terminal Emulator", and when I ran "ifconfig" I could see that I had an eth0 device with IP 192.168.7.1.  But I couldn't connect to it.

But if I turn on airplane mode, oddly, I can connect just fine by putting "192.168.7.2" in the address bar of the browser.  I haven't figured out yet whether it's possible to have LTE or Wifi on and still reach the beaglebone; perhaps it's just something to do with the IP addresses used by the Wifi or beaglebone.

BeagleBone DMA notes

I've been transferring data between the BeagleBone's PRUs and main memory.  If I use the PRU's SBBO instruction to store a range of PRU registers to main (DDR) memory, I find that I get around 600MB/s -- not bad!

But surprisingly, when I try to read that data back, the main CPU seems to go much slower.

I wrote some sample code for the main CPU to sum up all the bytes in a big (many MB) ordinary buffer.  I got ~300MB/sec.  Using the LDM instruction I got that up to 600MB/sec and in one case over 1GB/sec.  So in general the main CPU seems to have no trouble accessing main memory.

But when I run the same code on the buffer allocated by the uio_pruss kernel module, I get only about a tenth of that: 30MB/s, or closer to to 40MB/s when using LDM.

Kumar Abhishek from the BeagleLogic project helped me understand what was going on.  The uio_pruss module allocates that buffer using dma_alloc_coherent(), which is the standard way that linux kernel modules talk to DMA-based peripherals when they need to exchange smallish amounts of data quickly.  It tells the kernel that somebody else is going to be writing to main memory via DMA, so for this block of data, make sure we bypass the cache for every single memory access.

For larger blocks of data travelling in one direction, CPU -> peripheral or peripheral <- CPU, the Dynamic DMA mapping Guide describes that the standard approach is to kmalloc() the memory in the kernel module, then use functions like dma_map_single(), dma_unmap_single(), dma_sync_single_for_cpu(), dma_sync_single_for_device() to make sure entire buffers are safe for access by the peripheral or CPU.

That way, rather than every memory access having to bypass the cache, the kernel can make sure it's safe for the CPU to access everything in the block now that the peripheral is done with it, or vice versa.

Unfortunately, though, on the ARM A8 CPU in the beaglebone, making sure a buffer doesn't already have stale data in the cache (which can happen unexpectedly due to things like speculative preloading) requires the kernel to walk cache line by cache line through the entire buffer, taking longer than the memory transfer it's preparing for!

Kumar reports that he gets upward of 200MB/sec using this approach, dominated by the dma_* kernel calls.  I tried it myself with a simple kernel module and got a bit over 100MB/sec, so it seems plausible to me.

This thread, "dma_sync_single_for_cpu takes a really long time", is worth reading all the way through.

The only other way I can think of to get faster CPU access to big chunks of data from the PRUs is to tell the L1 and L2 caches to flush themselves, then access the data without calling the dma_sync_* functions at all.  The danger there is that it's very much tied to the specific CPU architecture and is very much not the recommended approach, so nobody's going to sympathize if you get corrupt data, and the only way to know if you've done it right is to try to test all the edge cases you can think of.