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redfield's avatar
redfield
Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
5 years ago

Signal Tap: Trouble Tapping NEC Protocol pin AA30

I am having difficulty debugging a program on the DE1-SoC I wrote to work with the included NEC IR remote control. I thought it was my code, but then I loaded the demo program called DE1_SoC_IR from the included “cd-rom” and I am experierhaving the same issues (can't tap a signal correctly with Signal Tap). The demo is located on the disc here: “\Demonstrations\FPGA” but my question is really trying to determine what I am doing wrong in Signal Tap, I have been successfully using the tool for other test scenarios, but I can’t correctly acquire the PWM signal from the LED RX on pin AA30 using the IR remote.

I assume most of you are familiar with the NEC Protocol… a 9ms burst followed by a 4ms window, etc. I have added a trigger on pin AA30 for Logic 0 (RX is the inverse of TX), start the analysis, and then press a button on the remote. This triggers the event BUT the signal does not go back to Logic 1 within the capture. That is, it is triggered at 0 and stays at 0 throughout the capture well past when the signal should revert to a Logic 1 (by spec it should be at 9ms).

I added some images of my setup, maybe this will help. I'm really banging my head on this, so any help or pointers would be appreciated. Note: I am using a 50mhz clock and a 128k sampling depth.

Thanks in advance for any pointers you can supply.

5 Replies

  • redfield's avatar
    redfield
    Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
    5 years ago

    If I route the input from AA30 to the GPIO, I can attach my scope and see the NEC protocol as expected, but I still can't see this within SignalTap. Picture attached...

    • sstrell's avatar
      sstrell
      Icon for Super Contributor rankSuper Contributor
      5 years ago

      One thing to be aware of with the Signal Tap waveform view is that you can basically set the scale to anything, which is weird, but that's the way it works. You have it set to "ms", but you may not be looking at ms, and with a sample depth of only 128K samples, you're definitely not seeing ms. You should always think about the waveform view in terms of samples (1 per sampling clock cycle).

      If my math is correct, with a 50 MHz sampling clock (50 million cycles/sec; 50000 cycles/ms), you'd need 450000 samples (50000 x 9) to see the end of 9 ms. Your sample depth is not even close to enough to see all this, so I'm guessing your scale is incorrect in the waveform view.

      I forget what the max sample depth of the logic analyzer is (128K may be the max IIRC), but if you want to see the full fall and rise of the signal, enable the storage qualifier feature to drop the samples between the falling and rising edge. You still won't see the full 9 ms though, only the beginning and ending of what you're looking for.

      • redfield's avatar
        redfield
        Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
        5 years ago

        This makes great sense, thank you. I knew there must be something I was misunderstanding about how SignalTap functioned. I will try this and report back this evening.

        Thank you for providing some insight!