CCS News

ADC2

Monday 17 May, 2021

Microchip has some chips out that they call ADC2. This is the ADC module with a computational unit. In addition to legacy mode of operation, the ADC2 module can be setup in Accumulate, Average, Burst Average or Low-Pass Filter modes of operation. When setup for Accumulate mode with each trigger of the ADC, the conversion result is added to the accumulator and the ADCNT register is incremented. When setup for Average mode with each trigger of the ADC the conversion result is added to the accumulator and when the specified number of triggers has been done, the average will be preformed on the accumulator. When setup for Burst Average mode, it is similar to Average mode the difference being that when the ADC is triggered, it will perform the specified number of conversions and then perform the average calculation. When setup for Low-Pass Filter mode with each trigger of the ADC, the conversion result is sent through the filter.

To support these modes of operation, the CCS C Compiler's built-in setup_adc() function has an optional 2nd and 3rd parameter to set some parameters when using these the new modes of operation. When using Accumulate, Average or Burst Average modes the 2nd parameter sets how much the accumulated value is divided by after each conversion. When using Low-Pass Filter mode the 2nd parameter sets the cut-off frequency of the filter. The 3rd parameter to the function sets the number of samples to be done before performing a threshold comparison for Average, Burst Average and Low-Pass Filter modes of operation.

In addition to the updates to the setup_adc() function, the built-in functions adc_write() and adc_read() have been added to write and read some the other registers used by the ADC2 module. For example when setup for Low-Pass Filter mode, the filtered result is stored in the ADFLTRH and ADFLTRL registers. After the calculation is completed the adc_read() function can be then be used to read the filtered result, for example:

Result = adc_read(ADC_FILTER);

Another feature of the ADC2 module is the ability to set a trigger source to start a conversion. To support this feature the built-in function set_adc_trigger() has been added to the CCS C Compiler. For example the following can be used to setup the ADC2 module to trigger the conversion when Timer 2 period match occurs:

set_adc_trigger(ADC_TRIGGER_TIMER2);

The following is an example using the CCS C Compiler to setup and use the ADC2 module for Low-Pass Filter mode, see ex_lowpass_filter_adc2.c in the PICCExamples folder for entire example:

setup_timer_2(T2_CLK_INTERNAL | T2_DIV_BY_128, 155, 10);

//~10ms period, 100ms interrupt

setup_adc_ports(ADC_PIN, VSS_VDD);
setup_adc(ADC_LOW_PASS_FILTER_MODE | ADC_CLOCK_INTERNAL |
ADC_TAD_MUL_255 | ADC_THRESHOLD_INT_END_OF_CALCULATION,
FILTER_CUT_OFF_FREQ, ADC_READINGS);

set_adc_channel(ADC_CHANNEL);
set_adc_trigger(ADC_TRIGGER_TIMER2);

while(TRUE)
{
if(interrupt_active(INT_AD_THRESHOLD))
{
FilteredResult= adc_read(ADC_FILTER);
clear_interrupt(INT_AD_THRESHOLD);
}
}

Conditioning ADC data has become a standard requirement for dealing with analog voltages. Even a small amount of noise can disrupt your application. The ADC2 modules can save a lot of processing time to automate the most common filtering operations. See the ex_adc2_trigger.c example program in the compiler example directory for a full program.



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