Re: [PATCH v6 4/7] pwm: pca9685: Support staggered output ON times

[Clemens Gruber]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 08:02:06PM +0200, Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 07:16:38PM +0200, Clemens Gruber wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 07:03:57PM +0200, Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
> > > On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 02:57:04PM +0200, Clemens Gruber wrote:
> > > > The PCA9685 supports staggered LED output ON times to minimize current
> > > > surges and reduce EMI.
> > > > When this new option is enabled, the ON times of each channel are
> > > > delayed by channel number x counter range / 16, which avoids asserting
> > > > all enabled outputs at the same counter value while still maintaining
> > > > the configured duty cycle of each output.
> > > > 
> > > > Signed-off-by: Clemens Gruber <clemens.gruber@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > > 
> > > Is there a reason to not want this staggered output? If it never hurts I
> > > suggest to always stagger and drop the dt property.
> > 
> > There might be applications where you want multiple outputs to assert at
> > the same time / to be synchronized.
> > With staggered outputs mode always enabled, this would no longer be
> > possible as they are spread out according to their channel number.
> > 
> > Not sure how often that usecase is required, but just enforcing the
> > staggered mode by default sounds risky to me.
> 
> There is no such guarantee in the PWM framework, so I don't think we
> need to fear breaking setups. Thierry?

Still, someone might rely on it? But let's wait for Thierry's opinion.

> 
> One reason we might not want staggering is if we have a consumer who
> cares about config transitions. (This however is moot it the hardware
> doesn't provide sane transitions even without staggering.)
> 
> Did I already ask about races in this driver? I assume there is a
> free running counter and the ON and OFF registers just define where in
> the period the transitions happen, right? Given that changing ON and OFF
> needs two register writes probably all kind of strange things can
> happen, right? (Example thought: for simplicity's sake I assume ON is
> always 0. Then if you want to change from OFF = 0xaaa to OFF = 0xccc we
> might see a period with 0xacc. Depending on how the hardware works we
> might even see 4 edges in a single period then.)

Yes, there is a free running counter from 0 to 4095.
And it is probably true, that there can be short intermediate states
with our two register writes.

There is a separate mode "Update on ACK" (MODE2 register, bit 3 "OCH"),
which is 0 by default (Outputs change on STOP command) but could be set
to 1 (Outputs change on ACK):
"Update on ACK requires all 4 PWM channel registers to be loaded before
outputs will change on the last ACK."

The chip datasheet also states:
"Because the loading of the LEDn_ON and LEDn_OFF registers is via the
I2C-bus, and asynchronous to the internal oscillator, we want to ensure
that we do not see any visual artifacts of changing the ON and OFF
values. This is achieved by updating the changes at the end of the LOW
cycle."

We could look into this in a future patch series, however I would like
to keep the register updating as-is for this series (otherwise I would
have to do all the tests with the oscilloscope again and the transitions
were like this since the driver was first implemented).

Thanks,
Clemens