For embedded system designers, if they can perform preliminary simulation tests on hardware IC evaluation or software development processes before starting the project, this will greatly increase the stability of the later system design, shorten the development cycle, and budget development costs. This article will introduce how to use Texas Instruments (TI) RF evaluation tool SmartRF Studio to achieve rapid development of the CC1310 chip.
1. Introduction to CC1310 chip
1.1Basic features
The CC1310 chip is a cost-effective, ultra-low power consumption SBU-1GHz RF radio frequency device in the Texas Instruments (TI) CC26xx and CC13xx series devices. Its active RF and microcontroller (MCU) have extremely low current consumption, and it also has flexible multiple low-power modes to ensure excellent battery life for long-range operation powered by small coin cells. and energy harvesting applications.
The CC1310 chip is the first in a sub-1GHz family of cost-effective, ultra-low power wireless MCUs that supports multiple physical layer and RF standard platforms and combines flexible ultra-low power RF transceivers with powerful 48MHz Cortex®-M3 microcontroller. Its dedicated wireless controller (Cortex®-M0) handles low-level RF protocol commands stored in ROM or RAM, ensuring ultra-low power consumption and flexibility. The CC1310 chip device has excellent sensitivity and stability (selectivity and blocking) performance.
The CC1310 chip device is a highly integrated, true monolithic solution that integrates a complete RF system and an on-chip DC-DC power module converter.
Sensors are processed in an ultra-low-power manner by a dedicated ultra-low-power autonomous MCU, which can be configured to handle analog and digital sensors so the main MCU (Cortex-M3) can maximize sleep time.
The CC1310 chip power and clock management as well as the wireless system require specific configurations and are handled by software to operate correctly, all of which are implemented in TI-RTOS. TI recommends using this software framework throughout the entire application development process for the device. The complete TI-RTOS and device drivers are available free of charge in source code form.
1.2 On-chip resources
Powerful ARM® Cortex®-M3 processor
Clock rates up to 48MHz
128KB in-system programmable flash memory
8KB cached static random access memory (SRAM)
Ultra-low power sensor controller
On-chip internal DC-DC converter
2 synchronous serial interfaces (SSI) (SPI, MICROWIRE and TI)
Integrated temperature sensor
2.SmartRF Studio
Smart RF Studio is a Windows application for evaluating and configuring low-power radio frequency integrated circuits from Texas Instruments. This tool is useful for exploring and understanding RF-IC products, and the software will help designers of RF systems easily evaluate RF-ICs in the early stages of the design process. It is particularly useful for generating configuration registers, actually testing RF systems, and finding optimized external component values.
3.SmartRF Studio7 and CC1310
3.1 Simulation using SmartRFStudio7
Before simulation, you first need to download the configuration tool SmartRF Studio7. The latest version has been updated to V2.6.0.
Download link: www.ti.com.
After downloading and installing SmartRFStudio7, we connect the hardware device (here is the LanunchPad development board) to the computer through the emulator, open SmartRF Studio7, and the device is connected normally as shown in the figure:
Doubleclick the CC1310 icon to open the configuration simulation interface. First select the simulation parameters. We choose the default 50kbps (airspeed), 2-GFSK (modulation method), and 25k deviation (frequency deviation), as shown in the figure:
After setting up according to the picture above, connect the other board to the computer in the same way, set the same RF parameters, click on Packet TX on one board, then click the right Start button, click on the Packet RX page on the other board, and click on the lower right corner Start button, you can see that the data from the sending board is received in the receiving board.
Using this simulation process, you can use a spectrum analyzer to view the transmission of RF information. During hardware development, you can directly use this tool to test and verify RF hardware performance, including transmit power, receiving sensitivity, second harmonic and other RF hardware parameters.
3.2 Software development parameter configuration
In addition to using SmartRF Studio to simulate the CC1310 chip wireless module, you can also use it to configure RF chip software development registers or command parameters. Open SmartRF Studio 7, click on the CC1310 icon, we modify the default RF parameters to:
Frequency band 915M;
Airspeed 10K;
Frequency offset 19K;
Receiving bandwidth 78K;
Transmit power 12dBm;
Other parameters are default, and the software configuration is as shown in the figure:
After the above configuration is completed, click the "Code Export" button in the command window, save the generated "smartrf_setting.c" and "smartrf_setting.h" to the software development project path, replace the original smartrf_setting.c and smartrf_setting.h files, and recompile the project. , the new project already contains the radio frequency parameters just configured. As shown in the picture:
Using SmartRF Studio 7 command software parameter configuration can help developers quickly master the settings of registers or chip command sets. It is convenient and simple. Compared with configuring by yourself, it can save more time, has high efficiency, and has no error rate. If the user forcibly configures invalid values for certain commands, the tool will also give a warning prompt, which is very user-friendly.
4.Finished product plan
The E70/E71 series Chengdu Ebyte is a wireless serial port module(UART) based on TI's CC1310 radio frequency chip, with TTL level output. This series of wireless modules is powerful and has 7 working modes, which can meet most current wireless data transmission IoT application scenarios. Its main features are as follows:
Ultra-low power consumption: the receiving current is only 8mA, and the sleep current is only 1uA.
Fixedpoint transmission: supports address function, the host can transmit data to modules at any address and any channel, achieving networking, relay and other application methods
Broadcast monitoring: After setting the module address to the broadcast address, you can monitor the data transmission of all modules on the same channel; the data sent can be received by modules with any address on the same channel.
Forward error correction: The wireless serial port module has a software FEC forward error correction algorithm.
Parameter saving: After the user sets the parameters, the module parameters will be saved and will not be lost when the power is turned off. The module will work according to the set parameters after powering on again.
Ultrasmall size: This wireless module is less than 1/2 the size of similar modules, and is highly recommended for usage scenarios with strict volume restrictions.
Secondary development: Introduce all IO to facilitate customers' secondary development and also support customized customization needs.
Complete series: 433M, 868M, 915M different frequency bands, 4x4, 7x7 different packages, 14dBm, 30dBm power levels.
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