[Tinyos-help] Re: [Tinyos-devel] DAC and MSP430RefVoltGenerator in T2

[Andreas Koepke]

Philip Levis:
> 
> On Feb 15, 2008, at 1:45 AM, Jan Hauer wrote:
> 
>>> If you don't have separate arbiters for the ADC and the DAC how can
>>>  you ever allow them to perform operations in parallel?  And this sort
>>>  of cascading through multiple levels of arbitration happens all the
>>>  time.  Think about how the flash drivers on telos work.  There is
>>>  arbitration to the flash operations themselves, sitting on top of
>>>  arbitration to the msp430 usart underneath.
>>
>> As long as two resources were not "double used" this practically never
>> was an issue, but now it becomes more probable:
>>
>> AdcClient1 successfully requests RefVolt.
>> Then AdcClient2 successfully requests ADC.
>> Then AdcClient1 blocks on request to ADC.
>> Then AdcClient2 blocks on request to RefVolt.
>> Deadlock.
>>
>> Pushing the solution to upper layers is dangerous - I'm saying we
>> should avoid this situation as much as we can in the first place.
>> Maybe we can think of other solutions, e.g. wrappers that perform
>> multiple request operations for you (in a non-greedy way) on top of
>> multiple arbiters.
> 
> Sure, badly written locking code can cause deadlock. Is there a case 
> when a client wants the ADC but *not* the RefVolt? The typical solution 
> to this is to layer them. There are many examples where an abstraction 
> needs multiple resources. The arbiters paper in SOSP goes into how you 
> do this, with the Light/Temp sensor board example. On the micasb, both 
> sensors requires the ADC and share a pin; so you acquire the pin before 
> putting a request to the ADC (Figure 13).

Yes -- you can also use Vcc as reference for the ADC. This is how I do 
CCA on the eyesIFX, switching around with the RefVolt would take too 
much time, and precision is not needed.

> Phil
> 
> 
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