Sending the same word over SPI many times

[kapacuk]

Hello,

I'm using ChibiOS on STM32F103, communicating with a TFT display over SPI. I order to fill the screen (or part of the screen) with the same colour efficiently, I would like to be able to send the same 16-bit word over SPI many times in one DMA transaction. If I understand it correctly, the best way to do so would to set up a DMA transfer with the cleared STM32_DMA_CR_MINC flag. Unfortunately, there is no way to do it in ChibiOS - the spi_lld_exchange function always sets the MINC flag. Do you think it would be a good idea to expose this flag to the user somehow? Maybe change spi_lld_exchange to accept an optional boolean parameter, or something like this?

[Giovanni]

Hi,

What you need is a small change in spiIgnore(), it already sends the same data to SPI without MINC, it just sends always 0xFFFF. You just need to change the variable holding the 0xFFFF.

Giovanni

[kapacuk]

Thanks Giovanni, that would work for me. Should I submit a pull request, or will you make the change yourself?

[Giovanni]

This is something already planned but I cannot guarantee an availability date, this requires an API change or extension.

I suggest you make the change locally then, optionally, submit a patch in "small change request" forum.

Giovanni

[rew]

In a language that accepts optional arguments to functions, you'd extend the spiignore() function with an argument that defaults to "0xffff".

In the case at hand where this is not possible I would suggest you add a function that HAS the argument and redefine spiignore to call the new function with 0xffff as the argument.