Thursday, April 28, 2016

Beaglebone Black Analog input with Swift and the TMP36 sensor

In my earlier posts that should how to use Swift with the Beaglebone Black I used the SwiftyGPIO library to interact with digital GPIO ports.  While using digital GPIO ports can be very powerful the Beaglebone Black also has analog ports.  In this post I will show how we can use the TMP36 temperature sensor with an analog port to determine the temperature.

With the digital ports we measure one of two values (high or low).  With the analog ports we measure a range a values.  The Beaglebone Black provides seven analog ports labeled AIN0 through AIN6.  These ports are located on the P9 header and the following list shows what pin corresponds to which analog inputs:

AIN0  -  39
AIN1  -  40
AIN2  -  37
AIN3  -  38
AIN4  -  33
AIN5  -  36
AIN6  -  35

The following image shows the full headers:




Lets get started, if you have not already installed Swift on your Beaglebone Black you can check out my earlier post that talks about how to install it and also how to use the SwiftyGPIO library.  In this post we cannot use the SwiftyGPIO library because it does not support analog ports instead we will interact directly with GPIO ports through the file system.  This is how the SwiftGPIO actually works behind the scenes when you use it to access the digital GPIO.

Like always the first thing we need to do is to connect our sensor to the Beaglebone Black.  The following diagram shows how I connected the TMP36 temperature sensor to my Beaglebone Black.  Note that I have the TMP36 sensor connected to the AIN1 port.





Now that we have the TMP36 Temperature sensor wired to our Beaglebone Black lets power it up and see how we would read the Analog port.  Before we write our Swift code lets see how we would read the port manually from the shell.  The first thing we would need to do is to enable the analog ports.  To enable the ports we would echo “BB-ADC” to the  /sys/devices/platform/bone_capemgr/slots file.  Before we do that, lets look at the file.  If we run the following command we can see the contents of the file:

cat /sys/devices/platform/bone_capemgr/slots

The contents of the file should look something like this:

 0: PF----  -1
 1: PF----  -1
 2: PF----  -1
 3: PF----  -1
 4: P-O-L-   0 Override Board Name,00A0,Override Manuf,cape-universaln

Now lets enable the analog ports by running the following command:

echo BB-ADC > /sys/devices/platform/bone_capemgr/slots

If we cat out the contents of the slots file again, it should now look something like this:

 0: PF----  -1
 1: PF----  -1
 2: PF----  -1
 3: PF----  -1
 4: P-O-L-   0 Override Board Name,00A0,Override Manuf,cape-universaln
 5: P-O-L-   1 Override Board Name,00A0,Override Manuf,BB-ADC

The last line shows that the analog ports are now enabled.  Now that the ports are enabled, lets see how we can read the AIN1 port.  We can do that by reading the contents of the  /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device0/in_voltage1_raw file like this:

cat /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device0/in_voltage1_raw

The output of this command should be a number around 1700 or so.  If you look in the /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device0/ directory, you should see 7 in_voltage files numbered 0 through 7.  These files correspond to the seven AIN ports therefore if we connected our TMP36 temperature sensor to AIN2 instead of AIN1 we would read the in_voltage2_raw file.

Now that we know how to get the value from the analog ports, lets see how we would do this with Swift and convert that value to the current temperature.  The first thing we need to do is to create a function that will read the value from a file.  The following will do this and return an optional that would be either a String value or nil.

func readStringFromFile(path: String) -> String? {
      let fp = fopen(path, "r")
      guard fp != nil else {
            return nil
      }
      var oString = ""
      let bufSize = 8
      let buffer: UnsafeMutablePointer<UInt8> = UnsafeMutablePointer.alloc(bufSize)
       defer {
            fclose(fp)
            buffer.dealloc(bufSize)
      }

      repeat {
            let count: Int = fread(buffer, 1, bufSize, fp)
            guard ferror(fp) == 0 else {
                  break
            }
            if count > 0 {
                  oString += stringFromBytes(buffer, count: count)
            }
      } while feof(fp) == 0
      return oString
}    
In this function we use the fopen() function to open the file.   We use a guard statement to verify that the file opened properly.  If the file did not open properly we return nil.  To ensure that the file is properly closed and the buffer that we used to read the data is properly released we use a defer block to close the file and release the buffer.

We then continuously read from the file with a repeat block until we reach the end of the file.  When we read from the analog files, we will only go though this loop once and read four or less bytes of data but it is good practice to keep the repeat block to ensure we are reading all data.

We convert the bytes that we read from the file to a string using the stringFromBytes() function.   The following code shows this function:

func stringFromBytes(bytes: UnsafeMutablePointer<UInt8>, count: Int) -> String {
      var retString = ""
      for index in 0..<count {
            if bytes[index] > 47 && bytes[index] < 58 {
                  retString += String(Character(UnicodeScalar(bytes[index])))
            }
      }
      return retString
}

In this function we loop through the byte array and if the value of the individual element is greater than 47 or less than 58 (ASCII representations of 0-9 because we only want numbers) then we convert the byte to a character and append it to the return string.

Using these two functions we would read the TMP36 temperature sensor and calculate the temperature like this:

var file = "/sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device0/in_voltage1_raw"
if let input = readStringFromFile(file) {
      if let rawValue = Double(input) {  
            print("RawValue:  \(rawValue)")
            let milliVolts = (rawValue / 4096.0) * 1800.0
            print("milliVolts:  \(milliVolts)")
            let celsius = (milliVolts - 500.0) / 10.0
            print("Celsius:  \(celsius)")
            let fahrenheit = (celsius * 9.0 / 5.0) + 32.0
            print("Fahrenheit:  \(fahrenheit)")
      }
}
In this code we begin by reading the value from the /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device0/in_voltage1_raw file.  We then convert that string value to a Double value.  Once we have the Double value we need to convert it to millivolts using the (value/4096) * 1800 equations.  We then convert the millivolts to the temperature in Celsius and then convert the Celsius temperature to Fahrenheit.  This code will print out all of the values so you can see how everything is calculated.

To put all of this together, we would create a file named main.swift at put the following code into it:

import Glibc           
           
func stringFromBytes(bytes: UnsafeMutablePointer<UInt8>, count: Int) -> String {
      var retString = ""
      for index in 0..<count {
            if bytes[index] > 47 && bytes[index] < 58 {
                  retString += String(Character(UnicodeScalar(bytes[index])))
            }
      }
      return retString
}
           
func readStringFromFile(path: String) -> String? {
      let fp = fopen(path, "r")
      guard fp != nil else {
            return nil
      }
      var oString = ""
      let bufSize = 8
      let buffer: UnsafeMutablePointer<UInt8> = UnsafeMutablePointer.alloc(bufSize)
       defer {
            fclose(fp)
            buffer.dealloc(bufSize)
      }

      repeat {
            let count: Int = fread(buffer, 1, bufSize, fp)
            guard ferror(fp) == 0 else {
                  break
            }
            if count > 0 {
                  oString += stringFromBytes(buffer, count: count)
            }
      } while feof(fp) == 0
      return oString
}    
           
var file = "/sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device0/in_voltage1_raw"    
while(true) {
      if let input = readStringFromFile(file){
            if let rawValue = Double(input) {  
                  print("RawValue:  \(rawValue)")
                  let milliVolts = (rawValue / 4096.0) * 1800.0
                  print("milliVolts:  \(milliVolts)")
                  let celsius = (milliVolts - 500.0) / 10.0
                  print("Celsius:  \(celsius)")
                  let fahrenheit = (celsius * 9.0 / 5.0) + 32.0
                  print("Fahrenheit:  \(fahrenheit)")
                  usleep(1000000)
            }
      } else {
            break
      }
}
We would then compile this application like this: 

swiftc –o temperature main.swift

To run the application we need to ensure that we initiate the analog ports first with the echo BB-ADC > /sys/devices/platform/bone_capemgr/slots command.  You will only need to run this command once after booting your Beaglebone.  Once you initiate the analog ports you can read the temperature like this.

./temperature

If everything is properly connected you should see the temperature printed to the screen.



No comments:

Post a Comment