Interfacing TDC1000 eval board - serial commands

Bastiaan,

a) We are only releasing the TDC1000 EVM firmware. For TDC1000-TDC7200EVM, you can find the EVM firmware as part of the GUI install folder

C:\Program Files (x86)\Texas Instruments\TDC1000_7200EVM\Firmware

For TDC1000-C2000EVM, it is under

C:\Program Files (x86)\Texas Instruments\TDC1000_C2000\Firmware

b) Please see the following post for a description of the protocol commands for TDC1000-C2000EVM

e2e.ti.com/.../504246

For TDC1000-TDC72000EVM, the protocol is very similar. I can post an update specific to this EVM if that's what you are interested.

Thanks,
vishy

Hello Basti,

For the TDC1000-TDC7200EVM, there is a command/response protocol between the PC GUI and EVM MSP430. Following are the important features of this:

- Command/Response Protocol: GUI is the master sending the command and MSP430 sends slave response.

- Packet buffer (32byte in size) is exchanged between GUI and MSP430

- Command packet from GUI is ASCII while packet response from MSP430 is always in binary.

- File “host_interface.h” file lists all the packet commands available:

In command packet buffer GUI fills bytes 0-7: bytes0/1 constitute the command, rest any data associated with the command, bytes 8-31 is 0

In response packet buffer MSP430 fills in bytes 8-31. Bytes 0-7 is usually left unchanged. Always a response is sent to let GUI know MSP430 received the command. So the response packet is some times identical to command packet.

- For example

30 32 30 38 30 3A 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30

is a command (0x02) from GUI to do a TDC1000 spi byte write to register address (0x08) the value (0x0A). Since this is a write command, the MSP430 simply echos back the packet buffer w/o any change.


- There are two types of TOF commands:

a) TOF_One_Shot where a single TOF measurement is made

b) TOF_Graph, where the MSP430 continuously makes TOF measurements (every TRIGGER_UPDATE_FREQ period)

- A TOF measurement is always sent by MSP430 as a special 40byte TOF packet. Of this the first 39 bytes represent the TDC7200 measurement registers. FYI, there are 13 24-bit measurement result registers in TDC7200 that contains the TOF measurement.

- In case of TOF_One_Shot command, first the response packet (same as command) is sent following the command. Then a TOF packet (after 1 TRIGGER_UPDATE_FREQ period) is sent.

- In case of TOF_Graph command, first the response packet (same as command) is sent. Then every TRIGGER_UPDATE_FREQ period a TOF packet is sent until the TOF_Graph_End command is received.

- For example the following is a 40byte packet with TOF
00 02 5e 00 10 18 00 07 bc 00 14 68 00 00 db 00 14 9e 00 06 31 00 19 55 00 03 33 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 dc 00 58 a8 00

- The first 39bytes are interpreted to form the TOF measurements (start to stop1, start to stop2, etc.). Bytes 0-2 represent TIME0 register, bytes 3-5 represent CLOCK_COUNT1 register, and so on. Please refer TDC7200 data sheet for explanation on this and how they are used to compute TOF.

- TDC1000 based temperature measurement is a special case. Normally, the 40th byte of TOF packet is 0 representing time measurement. If TOF packet corresponds to a temperature measurement, then the 40th byte is 0xA5. TOF conversion to temperature is explained in TDC1000 data sheet.

Note: TDC1000-TDC7200EVM Firmware source code is part of the GUI Software install folder. You can find the source code zip in the following GUI install folder of your PC
C:\Program Files (x86)\Texas Instruments\TDC1000_7200EVM\Firmware

Thanks,
Vishy