PB:Enabling and disabling I/O
Over at Adafruit is a great introduction to the Device Tree, that is used on BeagleBones.
BeagleBone black originally came with a kernel 3.8 which had a Device Tree Overlay (DTO) and a capemanager. But in the newer kernels, at time of writing 4.9, the DTO has been completely reorganised and there is no need for at capemanager any more. Find your kernel version by typing in uname -r.
If you are running kernel 3.8.x please follow these guidelines Example One and Example two and the instructions given in Derek Molloys book Exploring BeagleBone Black.
For kernels newer or equal to 4.9 follow the guideline below.
Rober Nelson has written a short guide to enable a few of the most used IO's. The rest should be deductable if you combine the pin configuration seen below and the commands given.
The IO is available through a virtual filesystem starting in /sys.
Setting up and Enabling PWM
Switch to user root (if you have given your root-login a password - otherwise use sudo's).
] $ su -
The utility config-pin can setup the configuration. Use config-pin --help to get an overview of the possibilities with the command.
The PB has two PWM chips on board. Chip0 and Chip1 each carrying two PWM channels.
In order to send pwm output from PWM A on Chip0 through the pinmux to pin 1,36 issue these commands:
[ ✓ root@beaglebone [~] $ config-pin p1_36 pwm [ ✓ root@beaglebone [~] $ config-pin -q p1_36 P1_36 Mode: pwm
The output using the -q option show you the current configuration.
After the config-pin utility has been executed change to this directory
] $ cd /sys/devices/platform/ocp/48300000.epwmss/48300200.pwm/pwm/pwmchip0/
In order to enable Chip0 perform
] $ echo 0 > export
Now the chip0 is enabled which will reveal a pwm0 directory in current directory.
Change into the directory pwm0 and list the files available.
[ ✗ root@beaglebone [pwm0] $ ll total 0 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 0 Mar 9 10:51 . drwxrwxr-x 4 root pwm 0 Mar 9 10:50 .. -r--r--r-- 1 root root 4.0K Mar 9 10:51 capture -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.0K Mar 9 11:05 duty_cycle -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.0K Mar 9 10:56 enable -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.0K Mar 9 11:04 period -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.0K Mar 9 10:51 polarity drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Mar 9 10:51 power -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.0K Mar 9 10:51 uevent
provided you've made an alias called ll in root home directory in the file .bashrc - otherwise use ls -al
Write the desired period time for the pwm signal into period
Write the desired duty cycle into duty_cycle
Write a "1" into the enable file in order to enable the pwm. Use 0 (Zero) to disable the pwm again.
Examples
An example:
[ ✓ root@beaglebone [pwm0] $ echo 1000000000 > period [ ✓ root@beaglebone [pwm0] $ echo 500000000 > duty_cycle [ ✓ root@beaglebone [pwm0] $ echo 1 > enable
The is the result:
Of course the enabling can happen at any time desirable after you've set-up period and duty cycle, so you can set-up the polarity, period and duty cycle when ever convenient and enable when needed. Writing a 0 into enable disables the output again.
NOTICE: The two PWM outputs from one PWM chip shall run with the same period, but can run with different duty cycle. Below is P1,36 and P1,33 running the same period but different duty cycle. The period was set on pwm0 in this case and it cannot be changed in pwm1.
Setting up a GPIO
The config-pin utility and the figure above can be used to figure out which pin to use and to put it into the correct mode.
First find a suitable pin to use for GPIO. I choose P2 pin 1 from the figure.
Issuing this command:
] $ config-pin -l P2-01
gives this output:
default gpio gpio_pu gpio_pd gpio_input pwm
The output tells us the the pin can be set into GPIO mode. This can be done by issuing
] $ config-pin P2-01 out
query the pin setting by issuing
] $ config-pin -q P2-01
and get a response like this
P2_01 Mode: gpio Direction: out Value: 0
From this we can tell the the pin is in gpio mode as output.
Issuing an other option the config-pin we can get information about the pin
] $ config-pin -i P2-01
Pin name: P2_01 Function if no cape loaded: pwm Function if cape loaded: default gpio gpio_pu gpio_pd gpio_input pwm Function information: ehrpwm1a default gpio1_18 gpio1_18 gpio1_18 gpio1_18 ehrpwm1a Kernel GPIO id: 50 PRU GPIO id: 82