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ESP3hursday2 (late ESP32uesday): Poking DMA With a Stick
Normally I blog about ESP32 on Tuesdays, but was super exhausted after a trip to a monster-themed convention, so this one’s late. Saw some excellent monsters though!
Recap: I’ve been tasked with learning the intricacies of the ESP32 family, as they’re more available than other parts during this chip shortage. A pressing need is to get the Adafruit_Protomatter RGB matrix library working with the LCD peripheral unique to the ESP32-S3. Not quite there yet, but making headway. Part 1. Part 2.
The S3’s LCD peripheral requires using DMA (direct memory access), which I was dreading as another steep learning curve…but as it turns out, it’s not entirely unfamiliar, somewhat resembling the DMA implementation on Atmel SAMD chips, which I’ve used quite a bit! Much of the jargon and concepts are exactly the same…channels, descriptors, linked lists and so forth…
Left: ESP32-S3 Technical Reference Manual. Right: SAMD51 Datasheet. Both use linked lists of DMA descriptor structures.
The ESP32-S3 is a bit different from prior ESP32 generations. The new “General DMA” (GDMA) allows somewhat arbitrary mapping between channels and peripherals, whereas prior ESP32’s tended toward peripheral-specific DMA instances and channels…
Left: ESP32-S2 DMA Modules. Right: ESP32-S3 Channels and Modules. Nice.
The only place it gets peculiar compared to SAMD is that RAM-to-RAM DMA transfers (e.g. like a background memcpy()) require two channels, an “inlink” and “outlink” with GDMA as the middleman. That’s not something needed in Protomatter, just an interesting tidbit learned along the way.
Additionally, ESP32-S3’s GDMA supports “round-robin” scheduling (cycling through DMA channel transactions, rather than each in turn)…again, not vital for Protomatter, but I could see this being helpful for other projects like NeoPXL8 (not currently ESP32-compatible) and am eager to explore this later. SAMD51 is supposed to support round-robin scheduling but I could never get it to work, unsure if ineptitude on my part or a documentation or silicon errata issue.
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