http://tuxgraphics.org/electronics
Fast realtime communication over ethernet
Abstract:
The tuxgaphics avr ethernet board can be used for very fast time critical
communication. You can read sensor data
or control io-ports with less than a millisecond delay.
The trick is to remove the TCP/IP overhead and use raw ethernet frames.
A Linux application using RAW network sockets is controlling this.
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The idea
A few weeks ago I received from Rogier Schouten (http://www.rogiershikes.tk) a very interesting email.
Hi Guido,
I have a project, based on your "AVR-based ethernet device", that might
interest you. To my surprise, Ethernet+AVR in hobby projects only seems
to be used for web-based or network communications. In industry,
Ethernet is more and more used for fast I/O (i.e. on a cable with only
master PC and slave devices). You can look up e.g. the "EtherCAT"
standard if you like.
With this in mind, I changed your code for faster, possibly real-time
communication between PC and AVR. I dropped support for higher-level
protocols such as UDP, and in return there is faster communication,
suitable for e.g. controlling a robot directly from the PC. It is a
great replacement for e.g. the RS232 link that I used for such purposes.
The code described here allows for sending a packet AND receiving the
reply in under 320 microsec. This allows for about 3kHz updates. Using a
real-time extension for linux (such as Xenomai+RTnet), this
communication can be made real-time (i.e. supporting deadlines).
This is an application that I really missed on the tuxgraphics website,
so I give you the code and you can do what you want with it.
Regards,
Rogier
I looked at Rogier's code (download at the end of this article) and what he did
is this: He reduced the overhead for packet communication to almost zero
by removing all the protocol layers except plain IEEE 802.3 ethernet and
he minimized the communication between ethernet controller chip (enc28j60) and
avr microcontroller. To use this you need a direct straight ethernet cable
between avr ethernet board and a Linux PC (a direct cable and not a cross over
cable is needed because the tuxgraphics ethernet board has a auto-MDIX jack).
His linux control application does not necessarily need a real-time extension
for linux. Any linux PC will do. You just have to run it as root and you can
still get communication packets flying between PC and avr ethernet board
in fractions of milliseconds intervals. The ethernet cable can be 100m long.
Changes to run the data over a small switched LAN connection
Rogier's code is optimized for speed but can not be used with a LAN
in-between. It has to be a dedicated cable. The reason is that reply packet
is sent back to the broadcast address FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF. This was done because
setting the correct address would cost time.
I wanted to see if it can be changed to add a bit more "networking
overhead" and be able to run it over the normal office LAN. So the code
presented as part of this article can be run safely on a LAN used by
other PCs as long as the LAN is not carrying too much traffic and there must
be only switches in the LAN connection between controlling PC and avr
ethernet board.
The advantage would be that a PC with only one
network card can communicate in real-time with the avr ethernet board and still
use the normal office network at the same time.
In the download section for this article you have the choice to select whatever
is more suitable for your purpose. The original "rogier" code which is optimized
for speed and the slightly slower code which can run over LAN switches.
Switches, Hubs and WIFI-routers
10 years ago Hubs where the state of the art interconnection points on a LAN.
A Hub is just an amplifier and it does not look at the data in the packet.
Today it is even difficult to buy a Hub. Most boxes, even for small office
applications, are LAN-switches. A switch looks at the ethernet frame and
sends it only out on the ports where the communicating equipment is connected.
Switches should send any traffic for which they don't know where to send it too just
to all ports but it seems that some manufactures assume that the only packet
traffic is IP. They just drop packets when they don't know where to
send them to.
Communication on a local LAN in the IP world starts with
an ARP request. That is a "search for the MAC address" of a given IP address.
The ARP request is sent to the broadcast MAC address FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF. The IP
host owning the IP address replies with its own MAC address. By looking at
the ARP requests and replies the LAN switches can learn where the hosts in
the network are connected and to which ports to send the packets to.
In our case we don't use IP addresses. Everything is based on ethernet and
Mac-addresses but to be able to work with those broken LAN switches (or
optimized LAN switches as the manufacturer would probably call them) we need to
let the LAN switch know what the MAC address of the ethernet board is before
sending actual traffic. This is called gratuitous ARP request. This is
a spontaneous ARP request and we fill in some dummy IP address (=never used) just to teach
the switch what our MAC address is. The gratuitous ARP is sent at startup
of the board as soon as the link comes up.
While working with this ethernet realtime communication software I learned also
something about WIFI-routers. I always thought that they are just switches
inside the LAN and the routing function comes only in place when sending data
to the Internet. This is not the case. At least for my netgear WIFI router.
It does not switch any traffic between wired LAN and WIFI LAN unless those
are ethernet frames containing IP traffic. In other words plain ethernet
communication does not work over WIFI networks of this kind. It works only
over HUBs and LAN switches.
Summary: what is needed to run it over the LAN
In order to send plain ethernet frames over the LAN without
flooding the network we need two things:
- Use only unicast traffic with proper source and destination MAC addresses
(no FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF)
- Send a gratuitous ARP
The packet format
The eth_com_realtime-X.Y software, that's what I called the LAN capable code, uses the following packet format:
| - - - - - - | - - - - - - | - - | - - - |
dest MAC source MAC len data
In the example code we use 3 bytes of data. The actual ethernet frames
are much longer but the extra dummy data is added automatically by ethernet chip
to be 802.3 compliant and we don't have to worry about it.
What eth_com_realtime-X.Y does
The data is 3 bytes long. You can make it much longer if you want, up to 254
bytes but this is just an example application and you are expected to modify
it as needed.
- Byte zero in the data field is a sequence number. The ethernet board
just sends back what it gets from the Linux PC. This is to be able to
detect missing frames.
- Byte one is used to set the 8 output pins of PORTD according to the
bit pattern sent. You can use this to switch something on or off, e.g control
motors, lights, ....
- Byte two is just a constant at this moment. Use it if you want.
The ethernet board replies back to each packets that it gets and fills the
3 bytes of data as follows:
- Byte zero is the unmodified sequence number
- Byte one represents the state of the IO-Pins on port C. You can use it
to read up to 8 digital lines at once. Note: the DIP version of atmega168 has
only 6 IO-Pins on port C.
- Byte two is just a counter to send some data.
The application on the linux PC sends 256 packets in a row and the bytes one and two as
received are printed to the screen. The printing to screen is at the moment
the bottle neck. Everything is much faster without printouts but it is only
an example application showing that 16 bits of data (or more) can be sent and received at
high speeds over an ethernet link.
Conclusion
I really like it that people take existing open source code and build new things
with it.
This example shows how fast communication can be (very little delay). Web-servers are nice
because to offer a user interface without the need for a special application
software or driver but it is a slow way of communication with a max. 10 to 50 web pages
per second. Using the same hardware but raw ethernet speeds of several thousand
control packets per second are possible. You could read sensor data and control
any hardware in real time.
References/Download
© Guido Socher, tuxgraphics.org
2009-02-22, generated by tuxgrparser version 2.56