Archive for November, 2008

Modulo Means (reprised)

Sunday, November 30th, 2008 Nigel Jones

In my previous post I had asked for some input on how to compute the mean of a phase comparator. Bruno Santiago suggested converting the phase readings to their Cartesian co-ordinates and averaging the resulting (X, Y) data, and then converting the means of X & Y back into a phase angle. Well kudos to Bruno because this is exactly what I ended up doing. However, as Bruno observed, it’s not exactly an efficient process. It is however robust, and in my application, the robustness counts for a lot.

The suggestion that I average the inputs to the phase comparator has its merits. However for reasons that would take too long to explain, I’m not really able to do this in my application.

Finally, I’d like to mention the second solution that Kyle had proposed. First a caveat. I haven’t fully thought through this solution, and I most certainly have not implemented and tested it. With that in mind, here’s another approach to contemplate.

You’ll remember that we can compute the average of the phase angle by using the simple arithmetic mean, provided that we do not cross back and fore across the zero phase line. Well Kyle’s insight was that as well as computing the arithmetic mean of the phase angle, we also do the same for the quadrature angle. The idea is that while it is possible that the phase could alternate across the zero degree line, it would not simultaneously alternate across the 90 degree line (or indeed the 180 degree line). Thus, the method then becomes one of computing two means and choosing the correct one. If I get the time I’ll develop this into a fully fledged algorithm and publish it for you all to, ahem, enjoy. I’m fairly sure that this method is not as robust as the Cartesian method. However, it is dramatically more efficient and thus is deserving of greater investigation. Bruno – perhaps you’d care to do the analysis in your CFT (Copious Free Time)?

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Modulo means

Friday, November 21st, 2008 Nigel Jones

Normally on this blog I’m either giving my opinions on embedded matters, or offering tips on how to do things better. Well today I’m turning the tables, as I’d like your help. Yesterday I ran into a rather perplexing problem, which I’d be interested to see if any of my readers can solve.

In a product I am working on, there is a phase comparator generating difference readings in the range 0 – 0xF. The phase comparator is somewhat noisy and so I want to obtain a moving average of the phase differences. Now typically to perform a moving average filter, one sums the elements in a buffer and divides by the number of elements to obtain the arithmetic mean. Indeed we can do this here, provided that we don’t flip back and fore across the zero line. If we do cross the zero line then the method breaks down. For example, if successive phase differences are 0, F, 0, F, 0, F …. 0, F, then the simple arithmetic mean of these numbers will be 8 instead of some value between F and 0.

You may think that the answer is to switch to signed arithmetic and operate over the range -8 … +7. However, a little thought will show that you have now merely shifted the problem as to what happens when the system is close to -8 such that the values alternate between -8, 7, -8, 7 … -8, 7.

Thus, can you come up with a robust, efficient solution to compute the mean of an array of modulo numbers?

The problem is solvable as one of the Engineers that I’m working with hit upon not one, but two possible solutions (nice work Kyle). However, I’d be interested in other possible approaches.

I’ll publish Kyle’s method(s) next week.

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Dogging your watchdog

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 Nigel Jones

Most embedded systems employ watchdog timers. It’s not my intention today to talk about why to use watchdog timers, or indeed how to use them. Rather I assume you know the answers to these questions. Instead, I’ll pass on some tips for how to track down those unexpected watchdog resets that can occur during the development process.

To help find these problems, it is essential to find out where the watchdog reset is occurring. Unfortunately, this isn’t easy, since by definition a watchdog reset will reset the processor, typically destroying all state information that could be used to debug the problem. To get around this problem, here are a few things you can try.

  1. Place a break point on the (watchdog) reset vector. Although this will typically not stop the processor from being reset, it will ensure that none of your variables get initialized by your start up code. As a result, you should be able to use your debugger to examine these variables – which may give you an insight into what is going wrong.
  2. Certain processor architectures allow the action of the watchdog timer to be changed between a classic watchdog (when the timer times out, the processor is reset), to a special form of timer, complete with its own interrupt vector. Although I rarely use this mode of operation in release code, it is very useful for debugging. Simply reconfigure the watchdog to generate an interrupt upon timeout, and place a break point in the watchdog’s ISR. Then when the watchdog times out, your debugger will stop at the break point. It’s then just a simple matter of stepping out of the ISR to return to the exact point in your code where the watchdog timeout occurred.
  3. If neither of the above methods are available to you, and you are genuinely clueless as to where to start looking, then a painful but workable solution is to ‘instrument’ entry into each function. This essentially consists of some code that is placed at the start of every function. The code’s job is to record the ID of the function into some form of storage that will not be affected by a watchdog reset, such that you can identify the offending function after a watchdog reset has occurred. This isn’t quite as bad as it sounds, provided you are good with macros, a scripting language such as Perl and are aware of common compiler vendor extensions such as the macro __FUNCTION__. Of course if you are that good the chances are you won’t be clueless as to why you are taking a watchdog reset!

I’ll leave it to another post to talk about the sort of code that often causes watchdog timeouts.

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