May 17, 2020


Beaglebone: A quick Guide to GPIO Subsystem

Introduction

GPIO subsystem is a very important subsystem that allows the users to interface the board with sensors and other peripherals and allow interaction with real world.Pocket Beagle and Beaglebone black are the two most popular variants among the enthusiasts. Both of which have AM335X at its heat and 2 PRU which operate at 200MHz. On the Pocketbeagle the SIP that you see is by octavo systems, which integrates TI’s AM335X and several other components like LDO, PMIC on a single SIP. IN fact it is this integration which has made the current form factor of pocket beagle possible , further it also leads to faster and quicker development and production time if I would like to prototype on pocketbeagle and then create my own custom board around OSD335X.In this post I will try to declutter the GPIO subsytem. I am using following variant of Linux
Linux beaglebone 4.19.94-ti-r42 #1buster SMP PREEMPT Tue Mar 31 19:38:29 UTC 2020 armv7l GNU/Linux

Inside the GPIO Subsystem

In the AM335X there are 4 GPIO modules where each module supports 32 GPIO pins. So in total there are 128 GPIOs . However not all 128 GPIOs are available on the Beaglebone varients. The actual number depends on the variant that you will use.On a beaglebone Black you have 2 Expansion headers P8 and P9 respectively which have 46 pins on each of them. ON P8 one can use 44 GPIO, Pin 1 and 2 are used for ground purposes and on the P9 only 23 pins can be used as GPIO.Similarly on the Pocketbeagle you have P1 and P2 expension headers which have 36 pins each. However 18 pins on P1 and 27 on P2 can be configured in GPIO mode

The figure below shows different columns that you will find in Expension Header section of System Reference Manual. There is a SRM document for each Beaglebone Black and Pocket Beagle.For more details one can go through the SRM LINK

  • PIN column is the pin number on the expansion header.
  • The PROC column is the pin number on the processor.Further there is a document called Technical Reference Manual (TRM) which can be accessed HERE . On the page no 10 of this document you can see that the SOC is physically divided into 3 section and each pad can be located by combination of column name and row number.
  • The Name column tells the default mode of the pin on poweron rest. However you can see the pin configured as in some other mode out of the box that might be due to the fact that a device tree overlay has altered it.
  • The MODE columns are the mode setting for each pin. Setting each mode to align with the mode column will give that function on that pin. The mode 7 is the mode in which the pins can behaiave as general purpose input output.

Conversion into Software Friendly naming Convention

In the image above which is taken from SRM, you would have noticed that the GPIOs are represented using a special convention, for example gpio1[2].This denotes that the pin is the 2nd pin of gpio module 1. But the kernel doesnot use this convention. So we need to know the corresponding number for this GPIO that the kernal would understand. In order to convert. Use the following algorithum
gpio1[2] = 1* 32 +2 = gpio34
gpio0[4]= 0*32 + 4 = gpio 4
The entry corresponding to each pin can be found in the /sys/class/gpio directory as shown in the figure below

Mode configuration for GPIO

There is a register that controls the mode configuration settings for each pin. The control module register section in the TRM explains it thoroughly.The PAD/PIN configurtion register starts at address 044E1800H(Base address(0x44E1000H) + 800H). The table below explains the mode configurations.

Details of Directory which corresponds to Pad configuration Registers

The sys/kernel/debug/pinctrl/44e10800.pinmux-pinctrl-single directory contains information about the configuration of pins as shown in the figure below.
On investigating further using the cat pins |more command one can see corresponding topins there is a hex value for example for pin0 there is a hex value 00000027 which denotes that the pin is in mode 7. Please note that the pin numbers you see here for example pin0 , pin1 here in the image above donot corresponds to the numbers as shown in the expansion header table we saw in the SRM. These register address as shown above for example 44e10800 can be helpful in locating the pin modes in the dts files. Further when you run this commandyou can have a different default mode on your board if it is configured differently in the dts file which is loaded on boot.

Further You can also see if a pin is already claimed by sub system by running following command as shown in the image inside the syskernel/debug/pinctrl/44e10800.pinmux-pinctrl-single directory.You should be very clearful in dealing with the pins which are already claimed.

Once we narrow down on a unclaimed pin we and before we configure it according to our need, we might be intrested to know the current mode in which the pin is configured Lets take an example lets say you are looking for a pin to use as GPIO and you run the command as shown in the figure above and findout that pin10 Iis unclaimed.You can see that pin10 is pin 1_34 on my expansion header and is in default mode. Now the next immediate point of investigation isto know what is its default mode. To know this one can run the following command cat pins | grep "pin 10"
So as you can see the pin 10 is already in the GPIO mode so we dont need to reconfigure the mode.

Pin Groups
Certain pins can belong to a perticular group, for example the mmc pins can be grouped in a group to know the groups one can do.
cat pingroups | more

User LEDs and controlling them through sysfs

The SRM tells us that the user LEDs are actually connected as below.
You can control these LEDs and assign them different operations like blink after a delay, heartbeat pattern, blink when the memory card is accessed etc.The entry for each userLED can be seen in the following directory as shown in the figure. Further if you cat the trigger, we can see the different settings for UserLEDs. The currently active setting is shown inside the brackets. For
In order to activate a configuration you can do echo "hearbeat"> trigger or echo "none" > triggger to turn it off. Similarly you can set these LEDs to perform different tasks.

Some Important Links

PocetBeagle SRM LINK
BeagleboneBlack SRM LINK
BeagleboneBlack SRM PDF
TRM A335X LINK