Re: Interrupt driven UART

Ico wrote:
goister@xxxxxxxxx <goister@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm working with a Toshiba TMP91 series MCU that doesn't seem to
have any UART control/status bits to check for empty data
register, rx/tx ready, etc, but does have interrupt vectors for
serial tx and rx, which is why I think I have to use interrupt
driven UART rather than polling it.

I have functions that expect to receive and send a single byte by
calling receivebyte and sendbyte functions. However, since it's
interrupt based, receivebyte seems to be pretty redundant. What I
have now is a UART receive ISR that first does error checking,
then copies the rx buffer to a global rx byte variable, and
setting a global rx_ready flag to 1. Then my receivebyte function
does nothing until the rx ready flag is set, after which it just
clears it. Does this make sense?

This might work, but imagine what would happen if a byte is received
on the uart while your code happens to be doing something else then
calling the uart_receive function ? Instead of having only one
'global rx variable', consider using a ringbuffer aka 'circular
buffer' aka fifo for this. The RX interrupt stores incoming bytes
into the buffer and updates the head and tail pointers, while your
uart_receive function reads one byte from the buffer, or - if the
buffer is empty - waits until new data comes available.

The OP will also need to implement some sort of critical section in
either case. I imagine this will be most easily implmented by
controlling the interrupt enable.

Lacking the data ready signal he will not be able to handle a data
overrun during buffer emptying. Lack of those signals sounds
ridiculous, maybe he should look again in his data sheets.

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