Computing stuff tied to the physical world

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Multiplexing code for Arduino

In AVR, Software on Mar 25, 2009 at 00:01

Here is an extract of the code to multiplex 5 serial ports in software on an Arduino Duemilanove:

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It’s a big bag of tricks, really. There is a timer running at 3x the baudrate, which detects start bits and then picks out data bits every three ticks. The crucial issue for the receivers is that the work is done in parallel for 5 input streams, but that these events are not happening at the same time. There are in fact 5 little state machine, each with their own independent state.

For the output, it’s slightly simpler: a buffer with all the 5 transmit bit states is scanned and sent out. The trick here is to fill that buffer with the proper bit patterns. When nothing is sent on a channel, its corresponding bit remains high in all values in the buffer. The transmit buffer has 30 entries, 3 per bit plus the start and stop bits. A simplification here is that all bytes are sent at the same time, i.e. start and stop bits occur at the same time on all active transmit channels.

The idea of multiplexing is that all received data is collected and sent out to the main (hardware) serial port, running at 57600 baud. Extra character codes 0x01 .. 0x05 are inserted into the multiplexed data stream to identify from which channel the data is coming. On the transmit / de-multiplexing side, the character codes 0x01 .. 0x05 are filtered out and used to indicate to which channel to send out the next characters.

If you connect two of these multiplexing shields back-to-back, you can send 5 independent bi-directional serial streams over a single 3-wire cable. Come to think of it, the following setup would make a great test for these multiplexing shields:

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The full source code for the multiplexing sketch can be found here. It has been tested at 9600 baud (all receivers must run at the same speed). It probably works at higher speeds even, but this hasn’t been tested. At some point, the Atmega chip is going to get swamped while handling the barrage of timer 1 interrupts. I haven’t really tested the transmit part yet, i.e. the de-multiplexing side of things.