Moving code from ESP8266 to ESP32
A while ago I made a mashup of Dan Royer's code CNC 2 Axis Demo with my own code for trapezoidal motion stepper and servo control for ESP8266.
I assumed porting the code to the ESP32 would be trivial, and that was true for the most part: changes like library name being Wifi.h instead of Wifi8266.h were not a problem. UDP now does not like multicharacter writes but you can use print instead. So far so good.
However, when it came to the interrupt code I was stuck with the stepper interrupt causing an exception sometimes. And to make things weirder, the servo interrupt worked flawlessly (both of them had the IRAM_ATTR directive if you ask me).
Going little by little, I could narrow down the culprit to a floating point operation during the interrupt, that would cause problems sometimes but not always. Browsing around I found this post. Where the solution was simple: do not use floats within the interrupt routines but doubles. The reason was the float calculation would be performed by the FPU while the double calculation is done by software. And because currently there is no save of FPU registers during interrupts, the use of the FPU inside interrupt code is forbidden. Maybe a future enhancement will handle that, but the simple solution of changing the float to a double fixed my problem entirely. I wish I had found that sooner :-)
I assumed porting the code to the ESP32 would be trivial, and that was true for the most part: changes like library name being Wifi.h instead of Wifi8266.h were not a problem. UDP now does not like multicharacter writes but you can use print instead. So far so good.
However, when it came to the interrupt code I was stuck with the stepper interrupt causing an exception sometimes. And to make things weirder, the servo interrupt worked flawlessly (both of them had the IRAM_ATTR directive if you ask me).
Going little by little, I could narrow down the culprit to a floating point operation during the interrupt, that would cause problems sometimes but not always. Browsing around I found this post. Where the solution was simple: do not use floats within the interrupt routines but doubles. The reason was the float calculation would be performed by the FPU while the double calculation is done by software. And because currently there is no save of FPU registers during interrupts, the use of the FPU inside interrupt code is forbidden. Maybe a future enhancement will handle that, but the simple solution of changing the float to a double fixed my problem entirely. I wish I had found that sooner :-)
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