1)   Introduction

The goal of this assignment is to control the position of a servomotor by generate pulses on the output pin for a time specified by various voltage of the input pin of the chip. The voltage should also be displayed by a 7-segment LED connected to some output pins of the chip.

2)   Overview of the PIC 16F88 Microcontroller

PIC16F88 is a member of the huge Microcontroller Chip Family with 16 I/O pins and 2 power pins. It contains a lot of functions which are abundant to this project. The essential features used by this project are

·        Programmable Flash

·        Data Memory

·        Interrupt

·        Internal clock and multiple time modules

·        A/D Module

Information of other features, such as EPROM access or power management, can be found in the datasheet of this chip, which is available at www.microchip.com.

a)   Programmable Flash

PIC16F88 has a 13 bit program counter, which can address 8K*14 addresses, or up to 1FFFh. However, it is paged so that accessing above 4K*14 will cause a wraparound. That is, the actual address is the address masked with 3FFh. The size of the code in this project is far from this limit, however.

The starting address after power up, named Reset vector, located at 0000h. The interrupt vector, called by the chip when an interrupt occurs, located at 0004h. Stack memory is hardware implemented, and is indirectly manipulated by some instructions such as CALL and RETURN.

b)   Data memory

Similar to IBM-PC, data memory is divided into several parts, called Banks in this chip, and a bank selection must be made before accessing an address outside current bank. Each bank has a 128 bytes extent, and some of them are mapped to the same position for convenience.

The lower part of bank is reserved for Special Function Registers, and above them are General Purpose Registers, implemented as static RAM. To reduce bank selection, this project use 70h-7fh, the General Purpose Registers mapped to the same position in every bank. Some Special Function Registers are also accessed to perform tasks such as A/D I/O or timing. Accessing to these registers will be discussed later.

c)   Interrupt

An interrupt is generated when predefined condition met, and the chip will make a call to the interrupt vector located at 0004h in the Programmable Flash. Some special flag bit in Some Special Function Registers are set before this call. This project use the A/D, Time0 and Time1 overflow interrupts for asynchronous operation.

The general tasks of the interrupt handler are

1.      First, disable all interrupt to prevent reentry

2.      Save context information, such the value of W register, the Status register and program counter.

3.      Check desired flag bits to see if the reveal the desired type of the interrupt occurs, and handle it with the flag bits cleared for future handling.

4.      Restore context information to enable the program continues as usual after the interrupt occurs.

5.      At last, enable interrupts to enable future interrupts

d)   Internal clock and multiple time modules

The chip comes with 3 timer modules, and 2 are used by this project. TMR0 and TMR1 are prescalable timers with different ranges. The TMR0 register and TMR1H/TMR1L are readable and writeable counter register for these two timers, along with the Status register for synchronous operations. Interrupts are also generated when these counters overflow, and this project use them to invoke asynchronous operations and generate signals with varied time interval.

e)   A/D Module

The chip comes with a 10-bit, 7-channel Analog to Digital module to convert input signals to 10 bit digital number. If the module is configured properly, after a flag bit in the ADCON0 register is set, an A/D conversation begins, and when it finishes, the result is placed into A/D result registers, namely ADRESH and ADRESL, and the flag bit is cleared. An peripheral interrupt is also generated to allow asynchronous operations

3)   Description of the test circuit

Here is a block diagram in the assignment guideline of this project.

Connection specification:

4)   Development of the control program

This program is divided into following modules:

• Initialization module
• Port A Configuration
• Port B Configuration
• Frequency Setting
• Interrupt Setting
• Interrupt handler modules
• A/D Interrupt
• TMR1 Interrupt
• TMR0 Interrupt

With the reset and interrupt vector fixed, the program placed a jump instruction at the reset vector, and the destination of the jump is the actual beginning of the program. The program then calls the initialization module, and then enters an infinite loop and is ready for interrupts.

a)   Initialization module

This module is spitted into 4 modules. These modules are independent, so they can be composed into one, but they are separated for easier debugging and understanding.

i)       Port A Configuration

The task of this module is to set analog input and digital out pins. TRISA register is set to 1, indicates the pin RA0 is set to analog input, and the rest pings on PortA are set to digital output. The ANSEL register is also set to 1 to select RA0 for A/D conversation, and the ADCON0 is set to b'11000001' in accordance. After the configurations are finished, the first A/D conversation is triggered after a short wait.

ii)     Port B Configuration

Because PortB is used for 7-segment LED display, both TRISB and PORTB registers are cleared to display nothing at the beginning.

iii)   Frequency Setting

The internal clock is set to 4MHZ, which is specified in the assignment guideline. This is implemented by setting the OSCCON register to b'01101110'.

iv)   Interrupt Setting

This project uses 3 interrupts, A/D, TMR0 and TMR1. A/D is used for A/D conversations, TMR1 for a 33HZ signal generator, and TMR0 for pulses. INTCON and PIE1 are configured to enable these interrupts, and T1CON and OPTION_REG are used to scale TMR0 to 1:16, and TMR1 to 1:1. TMR1L and TMR1H are initialized so that the first TMR1 overflow interrupt will occur 1/33 second later, and the timers are started when the configurations are done.

b)   Interrupt handler modules

After necessary tasks of the interrupt handler are done, the flags bits of interrupts will be checked. If a flag bit of an interrupt is set, a corresponding handle routine will be called. Routinely interrupt handler tasks will be performed at last.

i)       TMR1 Interrupt

Both the initialization and the handler routine set TMR1H and TMR1L to 35233 to ensure the overflow interrupt will occur after 30303 cycles, or 1/33 seconds, thus generate a 33HZ clock. For convenience, a high pulse signal output for the Servomotor and an A/D conversation request is also placed here. In other words, the pulse is set to high every 1/33 seconds, and the A/D conversation is also triggered every 1/33 seconds. The TMR0 timer is also enabled to set the pulse to low after a period of time. This period is calculated after the voltage is read.

ii)     A/D Interrupt

This interrupt handler does the heaviest job in the program. First, it copy the digitalized voltage into user defined variable named AnalogResultH and AnalogResultL, and AnalogResultL is abandoned since a continuum specified by AnalogResultH is enough. Then the duration of the high stage of the output pulse and the LAD output will be calculated.

According to the document of the Servo, a high stage of 0.36ms will cause the Servo turn to left, and 2.3 ms will cause it to turn right. Suppose the A/D result 0 means left, and 255 means right, then the duration of the high stage can be calculated by the following formula:

Duration       = 0.36+AnalogResultH/256 * 1.94 ms

              = 360+AnalogResultH*1,940/256   cycles

to store the duration in TMR0, we need to prescale it to fit. The upper bound of it is 2.3 ms, or 2,300 cycles. To make the maximum duration fit into a byte, the timer need to be prescaled to 1:16.

Duration =360/16+(AnalogResultH/256) *(1,940/16) ticks

              =22.5+ AnalogResultH/256* 121.25 ticks

Of course I can not do it with such precision with the little instruction set of the chip. Round downs are inevitable

Duration ≈22 + AnalogResultH/256*121

              ≈22 + -AnalogResultH/64 -AnalogResultH/128 -AnalogResultH/256

So, to make the TMR0 overflows Duration ticks after the TMR1 interrupt rise the pulse signal, the TMR0 register must be set to

TMR0           =256- Duration.

This result is stored in a variable named Time0Interval, and is used by the TMR1 interrupt handler routine.

This routine also scales the analog result to one digit value and displays it on a 7-segment LED. It is done by getting the high 4 bits of the high byte of the analog result.

iii)   TMR0 Interrupt

This interrupt handler routine merely turn the TMR0 interrupt off, and output a low signal to end a pulse.

5)   Overview of testing done before burning the chip

The test is done in the emulator. After loading the program into emulator, and execute it, it reads the value set on RA0, and output a pulse every 1/33HZ.