What Are Registers in embedded Rust?
- Registers are type of computer memory.
- They are reside near to CPU and used immediately by CPU.
- Can hold data (bits of sequence), storage address (pointers) or instructions.
- Registers holding the memory location are used to calculate the address of the next instruction.
- In terms of MCU’s registers are special memory regions
- These special regions map to or control some peripherals
- And we already know we have many of them in our board
- These peripherals are electronic components built in the MCU to provide its processor the ability to interact with IO devices.
- We will be following code from this repository
- https://github.com/PIAIC-IOT/Quarter2-Online.git
- We are using raw pointer here for demonstration purpose. It’s not recommended to use in normal programs btw except in genuine case
- Address (i.e. 0x48001018) points to a register
- This register controls GPIO pins. GPIO is a peripheral
- Also using GPIO we can drive the mapped pins to low or high
Light Emitting Diode (LED)
- Pins are electrical contacts and our MCU has many of them
- Few of them are connected to LEDs, few are connected to other devices on board
- Once a pin connected to an LED in right polarity and a high voltage applied to that pin that's the only case LED will glow
Reading the Reference Manual (RTRM)
Whenever we start learning a new programming language, using a new hardware or buy a new cell phone. Its documentation/guide is must read/follow thing to take full advantage of that.
- Manual says that MCU has several pins.
- These pins are grouped in ports of 16 pins
- Each port named with a letter (e.g. A, B, C,.., H)
- Pins within each port named with a number (e.g. 0, 1, 2,.., 15)
Since we are interested in finding pins associated with LEDs, so let’s check the manual to find out those pins.
- Manual says LD3 connected to PE9 and LD7 connected to PE11.
- Here "PE" in PEXX represents the port name (i.e. Port E of GPIO peripheral)
- The number after the port name represents pin number in the port.
- Each peripheral has a register block associated to it.
- A register block is a collection of registers allocated in memory contiguously
- The starting address of this block called base address
- Now we know to driving LEDs we need to manipulate with Port E registers. For that we need to find out the base address of Port E.
For finding base address of Port E we have to follow the reference manual. Little other information’s we extracted from the documentation:
- Bits 0-15 can be used to set the corresponding pins (i.e. bit 0 sets pin 0 and bit 15 sets bit 15)
- Also, bits 16-31 can be used to reset the corresponding pins
- All seems to be in agreement when correlating that information with our program,Writing 1.