Category: blackbox

With the recent release of the SPRacingF3 flight controller and the Seriously Dodo flight controller, both based on the newer STM32 F3 CPU, users have been posting great Blackbox flight logs demonstrating very fast and consistent looptimes. I found this interesting because the F3’s CPU isn’t clocked any faster than the F1 processor that is used on the Naze32 and compatibles.

One major difference between these CPUs is that the F3 has a hardware floating point unit, while the F1 must emulate its floating point support using some very large software routines. Floating point support is used in the IMU (which is responsible for estimating the craft’s attitude) and also as part of some PID controllers such as the new Harakiri controller. It’s not heavily used in any other parts of the code.

But how much time does the Naze32 spend doing floating point operations anyway? What is the total possible speedup available from just adding a hardware floating point unit? Could I speed my Naze32 up some other way?

Continue reading Profiling Cleanflight and speeding up the Naze32

In my last post I showed that Blackbox’s logging behaviour when writing to an onboard flash chip ends up adding a lot of variance to the looptime. This was because 3/4 of the time, Blackbox would just write its log entry to a write buffer in memory, which was very fast, but the remaining 1/4 of the time it would have to flush that buffer through to the flash chip itself, which was very slow. The difference in speed between these iterations causes a variance in the looptime which is undesirable for stable flight. This caused the distribution of overhead due to Blackbox logging to have a twin-peaked shape like this:

One way of solving this problem is to use the CPU’s DMA controller to send the write buffer out to the flash in the background. This way the buffer can be slowly written to the flash chip all the time while other tasks are executing, instead of the whole CPU pausing to make one big slow write every now and then. That’s still something I want to implement in the future, but in the meantime I looked into other ways to reduce the variance.

Continue reading Improving variance in Blackbox flash logging overhead